has the proposed zstd-only format been abandoned?

[jrmarino]

No work has been done recently on the new package format -- an upgrade that I feel is long overdue and needed for many reasons.

Has the effort been abandoned? If not, what's the roadmap look like? What are the current obstacles impeding it's development?

[vstakhov]

Nobody is interested most likely. This project requires some efforts and testing. I've lost my motivation due to the lack of interest from the community.

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On 31 July 2018 20:19:50 jrmarino ***@***.***> wrote: No work has been done recently on the new package format -- an upgrade that I feel is long overdue and needed for many reasons. Has the effort been abandoned? If not, what's the roadmap look like? What are the current obstacles impeding it's development? -- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #1701

[jrmarino]

How mature is the current work?
Perhaps the feature is worth truly forking pkg(8). I wonder if I have to start from scratch or if your work is mature enough to pick up from there.

[jrmarino]

By the way, the assertion "there is no interest in this work" has no basis in reality.
I've been running an modified pkg that creates zstd-compressed packages for over a year now, and the performance upgrade has been amazing. Who wouldn't want that?

Moreover, non-xz packages aren't truly supported. There are values hardcoded that would make it impossible to support gz or another format, so the use of libarchive to support all these different formats is more than overkill. Getting rid of libarchive completely would reduce tremendously the dependency tree on pkg. Again, who would object to that?

If you want to pretend nobody would prefer a huge speedup on packaging 1G tarballs, that's your prerogative but I will say publicly it's not true. Obviously at least one major consumer (Ravenports) wants it. And I'm willing to fork pkg to preserve your work. I'd just like to know what's left to do.

[vstakhov]

#1591

I have absolutely no time to write a detailed reply but my claim about lack of interest was based on no feedback from the whole pkg community when I've proposed this change. Your comment's tone seems like you blames me about that and it doesn't make sense at all. I was very keen about this change and I have even written this preliminary format support code.

[jrmarino]

Well, blame is not the right word, but I can definitely question the leap from "no feedback" to "no interest". Lack of feedback is the norm. How would people even use it or test the format if it's not merged? Any what % of the community even knows about this proposal? Probably a fraction of 1%.

I've been waiting for this for months. Bapt told me about it, and I've been waiting patiently to see it progress, but obviously became dismayed that it's not progressing. Obviously I was happy to see the preliminary code -- so much that I am finally following up now.

In my opinion, this is how pkg should have been designed to begin with.

[vstakhov]

In fact, I can continue this project if you have resources to assist/review/test that.

[jrmarino]

yes, i have the resources. I am building (and publishing) full repositories for dragonfly, freebsd, linux, and solaris platforms. I would have to pull updates into my parallel fork though: (https://github.com/jrmarino/pkg ), maybe as a separate branch.