Mozilla Firefox Switches To .tar.xz For Linux Packaging

[intelfx]

it is both lacking and unnecessarily different both to other tools and to itself. I think the lack of care about its command line tool being familiar <...>

So what exactly are those "unnecessary differences"? Care to show how exactly is it being unfamiliar?

<...> luckily xz developers didn't have that mindset which is why xz will become ze standard and zstd will not <...>

I really think you are writing from the year 2020 or so.

Xz was the standard. Zstd has already mostly replaced xz as the standard.

[Weasel]

zstd is often almost as efficient in terms of compressed size.

It's not. I did say it's significantly faster, but can we please just drop this roundabout way to saying that zstd compresses worse.

That's why e.g. Arch switched to zstd.

It was a mistake in my opinion.

[Weasel]

I really think you are writing from the year 2020 or so.

Xz was the standard. Zstd has already mostly replaced xz as the standard.

That's some hard cope.

[Phoronos]

xz is a good step for firefox....
They may change for something else in the future, let's wait and see.
But for now, it is good news.

[energyman]

Why is this even newsworthy?

Most people install firefox via distro package manager. There it is either repacked (deb, rpm) and noone cares or your package manager will make sure the decompression tools are part of the dependency chain (gentoo).

If you are one of those people who like to download stuff and vomit it over your system (or dump it into /opt where it belongs) you should also be able to take care of the decompression needs - and if you can't, you should not download and install stuff in the first place.

In short: end users should not care and distros won't either because they deal with worse all the time.

[Phoronos]

Why is this even newsworthy?

Most people install firefox via distro package manager. There it is either repacked (deb, rpm) and noone cares or your package manager will make sure the decompression tools are part of the dependency chain (gentoo).

If you are one of those people who like to download stuff and vomit it over your system (or dump it into /opt where it belongs) you should also be able to take care of the decompression needs - and if you can't, you should not download and install stuff in the first place.

In short: end users should not care and distros won't either because they deal with worse all the time.

YOU don't care.
But WE care.

[brad0]

Xz was the standard. Zstd has already mostly replaced xz as the standard.

Except it has not.

[Anux]

It was a mistake in my opinion.

Arch has the fastest package manager and zstd is a part of it. Therefore I think this is a good decision.

[Weasel]

Arch has the fastest package manager and zstd is a part of it. Therefore I think this is a good decision.

Downloading the packages is much slower than xz decompression already for most people (1 Gbps is about the same), so literally who cares?!? Except for clowns doing contrived benchmarks.

[fitzie]

So what exactly are those "unnecessary differences"? Care to show how exactly is it being unfamiliar?



I really think you are writing from the year 2020 or so.

Xz was the standard. Zstd has already mostly replaced xz as the standard.

1) gzip *; (compresses all files not ending with gz and removes them)
2) zstd *; (compresses all files including .zstd files and doesn't remove them)

saying zstd is the standard is pretty out of touch. no distro packaging, no container packaging uses it. not a default in github or gitlab, etc.