F21 System Wide Change: lbzip2 as default bzip2 implementation

[Miloslav Trmač]

2014-04-02 19:24 GMT+02:00 Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik at redhat.com>:

> = Proposed System Wide Change:  lbzip2 as default bzip2 implementation =
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/lbzip2
>

While the speedup is desirable, it's not really obvious that this is the
right time to do the change.

Looking at http://lbzip2.org/news , lbzip2 is still fixing crashes during
compression and decompression.  That's rather troubling: we need the bzip2
implementation to be roughly as stable as file system*.*  The Change page
implies that bzip2 is not actively maintained; that may be true but looking
at bugzilla.redhat.com, there has AFAICT never been a bug reporting that
something can't be compressed or decompressed--that's a *very* high bar to
match.  (I do appreciate that assertion failure and silent miscompression
are not the same thing.)

Having the library implementation and the command-line implementation
completely separate may frustrate debugging efforts when using an
application-builtin compression and saving uncompressed and compressing
manually may give different results.  That's not a deal-breaker but having
a single implementation would certainly simplify things.

Ultimately the easiest way to make this implementation change happen, not
only in Fedora but in all distributions, would be for the improvements to
be integrated into the upstream bzip2 codebase; has that possibility been
explored at all?
    Mirek
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