On 09/05/2016 10:38 PM, Jon Skeet wrote:
The "tried and tested" compression formats (gzip, zip, even bzip2)
If the overriding goal is a compression format that works everywhere now, then gzip is clearly the way to go, as we're already using it and all other formats are therefore more likely to cause a problem on some platform somewhere. Luckily, though, that's not an absolute goal. Although lzip format is not everybody's preference, this is also true for other compression formats, and lzip is a reasonable choice for problems that the new distribution attempts to address. Our continuing to distribute gzip-format tarballs will address backwards-compatibility concerns. Besides, it's not like this is our first rodeo. We formerly used Lempel-Ziv format, and switched to gzip format before gzip was nearly-universally installed and supported. PS. In looking into this today I found and partly fixed some year-2038 bugs in gzip! (Everything is connected....) See: http://bugs.gnu.org/24385