Re: Add Gitweb support for LZMA compressed snapshots

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 03:45:02PM +0000, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> 
> bzip2 has no advantages whatsoever. AFAIK xz is superior to other
> formats and it would be nice to see git make a technological stance
> encouraging xz.

git is not about encouraging any compression. If you have not noticed,
git-archive produces tar and not tgz (though it would not be difficult
to implement it, because we use zlib anyway). If you like xz and it is
installed on your system, you can always compress tar with it:

git archive HEAD | xz > my-archive.tar.xz

So, I see no reason to have this compression coupled with git.

> 
> > The only reason we have inbuilt gzip and zip support is because the format
> > is so similar to Git's own compression.
> 
> Personally I don't see the point of having zip support.

zip is still a popular format on Windows. If git archive was not able to
produce then creating would require creating tar first, extracting it to
some temporary directory and then creating a zip file. It is not very
efficient process and requires extra efforts, so because we use zlib
compression anyway, it makes perfect sense that we can create zip file
directly.

Dmitry