[arch-dev-public] [draft] Switching to xz compression for new packages

[Pierre Schmitz]

Hi all,

as people keep asking me about this it a news item seems still to be a
good 
idea.
--
About a month ago we updated our tools to support packages that are
compressed 
with the xz format, also known as LZMA2. Compared to gzip this will
decrease 
package size significantly; about 30% smaller or even more depending on
the 
data.

If you want to compress your packages with the new format change the
"PKGEXT" variable in the makepkg.conf of your build environment to
'.pkg.tar.xz'. Our tools like dbscripts, devtools, namcap and of course
pacman are able to process these packages. If you use any custom scripts
which match "*.pkg.tar.gz" files, make sure to change the pattern to
"*.pkg.tar.*".

To allow a smooth update for older installations pacman,
pacman-mirrorlist, libarchive, libfetch and xz-utils are kept in gz format.
(This is achieved by adding "PKGEXT='.pkg.tat.gz'" to their PKGBUILDs)
-- 

Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre