4 ms·
Worth reminding ourselves that the xz container format is awful. Actually, a lot of people don't realise that xz is a container, and not the compression format.
by LeoPanthera 6y ago
Worth reminding ourselves that the xz container format is awful. Actually, a lot of people don't realise that xz is a container, and not the compression format.
https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
- asveikau 6y agoBeen a while since I read this, but at the time I recall thinking... Some of the comments on corruption and CRCs seem less relevant in a world where the block layer does better. For example if you store xz files on ZFS.
- Zardoz84 6y agoand if you are downloading it from some place on Internet?
- asveikau 6y agoThen I suppose the best they can hope for are hardware packet checksums, tcp checksums, in some cases TLS will also flag corruption in transit, then it's on them to have a sane storage layer underneath. But for the specific scenario cited of historical archivists and preservation, I think it's reasonable to say "run zfs or a similar solution and closely monitor/replace the disks over time". That sounds more likely to work than building resilience into the equivalent of .zip and hoping those tools will recover such an error.
- jl6 6y agoThis is a polemic written by the author of a competing tool. You can tell xz isn’t so bad by the complete absence of any real world report of xz causing issues.
- saagarjha 6y agoThe only experience I have had with xz is uncompressing Apple’s Xcode archives. All I know about that is that it takes forever to do some sort of useless “signature verification”.
- vetinari 6y agoApple's xip format is based on xar, not xz.
- boomer_joe 6y agoI've never seen this article before, but it does not read like a polemic. Do you know of a rebuttal of the points mentioned?
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoSo what if it's written by the author of a competing tool? Can you show that it's actually wrong instead of dismissing it as a ‘polemic’?
- LeoPanthera 6y ago"Competing" tool - I suppose, but an open source, free tool. He doesn't have any skin in the game. Describing it as a "polemic" seems like an overly emotional reaction. Did you actually read it? It seems a well-researched, well-informed article to me, with solid verifiable facts.