Re: [svenjoac@gmx.de: Adding --lzma option to make-dist]

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

rms forwarded me Sven's message about lzma.  With apologies for
repeating things people may already know:

    It seems that the lzma format would be a very good candidate for
    distribution tarballs, 

Yes indeed.  In fact, Jim Meyering has already made patches to automake
to support it; he plans to distribute the next coreutils as .gz and
.lzma.  tar will support it at some point, too.  If GNU packages start
using it, I'm sure it will become rather widespread rather quickly :).

    if only it were more widespread; information and
    downloads are available at http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html.

That is indeed the original web site, but the software distributed there
(and in the p7zip project, which is the 7-zip.org code ported to POSIX)
contains nonfree code related to the rar format (nothing about lzma
itself).  The authors were not interested in removing the rar code.

Fortunately, another hacker has put together a 100% free distribution,
with the standard autotools && make infrastructure, and a cmdline
interface similar to gzip and bzip2:
http://tukaani.org/lzma/

The only caveat is that the file format will change once more; however,
newer versions will be able to read older lzma archives, so as long as
we stick to the 4.32.x series for now, it should be fine to use.

Karl