[libvirt] Bump tar format?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 01:25:35PM +0200, Michal Privoznik wrote:
> On 13.06.2016 11:46, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> > On Mon, 2016-06-13 at 09:57 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>> Since RHEL5 support has been dropped for a while now, maybe it's time to
> >>> revisit changing the tar format
> >>
> >> Yep, IIUC we should be fine for require pax support for the vintage of
> >> Linux we required.  *BSD should be fine too, so IIUC, their tar version
> >> uses libarchive which supports pax.  Windows has 7-zip which can do pax
> >> and of course cygwin. Finally OS-X has the pax command and support in
> >> the apple archive utility.
> >>
> >> So I think we're be fine to require it.
> >>
> >> While, we're changing this, I think we should probably take the opportunity
> >> to also switch over to using 'xz' as our compression format, instead of gz.
> >> Consider the 1.3.5 release compressed with different formats:
> >>
> >>  35109092  libvirt-1.3.5.tar.gz
> >>  25573966  libvirt-1.3.5.tar.bz2
> >>  12112612  libvirt-1.3.5.tar.xz
> >>
> >> Those results seem pretty compelling to me :-)
> > 
> > xz compression sure takes a lot of time!
> 
> Maybe it does, but it's done just once, while decompression is done
> multiple times. So I think we can switch to xz. In fact, I'd be okay
> with nothing but xz.
> 
> But will this solve the issue? I mean, the problem that Cole is seeing
> (and I'm too) with too long path names. Isn't tar the origin of it?
> Because if it is, I fear that changing compression algorithm won't help
> much.

We already agreed that we should switch to the pax format, I'm just
saying, we should *also* switch to xz compression.


Regards,
Daniel
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