On Thursday, 4 April 2024 17:20:25 BST Arnie T via devel wrote: > Hello Stephen, > > > How a decision to drop xz for some other compression library for software > > would be a fairly slow process. First a person who is willing to do the > > work would come up with a proposal on why it should be done and how it > > could be done. They would be expected to also test to see how much > > trouble this would be (aka find all the packages which use xz and could > > be changed to another library, which ones couldn't and what the effects > > would be.) Once that is done, they would make a general proposal to be > > reviewed by whatever technical committee a distribution has (Fedora has > > one whose acronym is FESCO, Debian has another or multiple others, etc). > > This would be reviewed and if accepted it would go as a future release > > work with a staged plan where some packages are moved in X release, some > > in X+1, and some final plan for X+2 (or backed out completely for some > > reason before then). There would be some amount of software which would > > rely on xz no matter what because either the upstream has no interest in > > changing or it is meant to use xz period. ... > > Currently most groups are between 0 and 1. There are a lot of things which > > need to be looked at before moving off can be looked at as a goal to make > > sure we aren't making things worse. > > > > I hope the above helps > > Thanks, I understand more of your explanation of how it's done. > > I don't know how much time was needed to decide for example an Arch Distro > change > > "Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression" > https://archlinux.org/news/now-using-zstandard-instead-of-xz-for-package-com > pression/ OK, that's my mistake. I thought that moving to open source Linux > OS Distro like Redhat-related Fedora would result big or important issues > can be fixed more efficiently than at Microsoft. > That is not a distro-wide change; that's changing one thing from `xz` to `zstd`. Fedora made the same switch back in Fedora 31, and thus doesn't need to do anything about package compression right now. The remaining things are a long tail of various bits and pieces that use `xz` for a variety of reasons, and where there needs to be a decision made; fwupd, for example, has switched, while the `xz` tool in the repo will probably never switch from `xz` to `zstd`. > I guess I'm learning that even important or wise choices (not saying _this_ > is) can't be done with taking a long time. Even if they are security > related issues. > > Thanks one more time for the nice explanation! > > Cheers! > > Arnie -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
