Important: Switch of GNOME tarball compression format

Tarballs on ftp.gnome.org will switch compression formats. Change occurs
in ~1 month and in ~7 months.
This only for *new* tarballs. All existing tarballs on ftp.gnome.org
will NOT be affected nor removed.

Currently tarballs are released using the formats:
 - tar.gz
 - tar.bz2

The intend is to switch to tar.xz only as per below transition period.

After the last GNOME 3.0.x stable release (May 25th 2011) new releases
will have:
 - tar.xz
 - tar.bz2

After the last GNOME 3.2.x stable release (expect Nov 16th 2011) new
releases will have:
 - tar.xz


To keep in mind:
1. This change only concerns *newly* released tarballs after above
mentioned dates.
2. If a file is is currently available as .tar.gz, it will still be
available after above mentioned dates.
3. Existing files will not be recompressed. E.g. I do *not* intend to
make gtk+-1.1.12.tar.gz available as .tar.xz.

For packagers:
 - the intention is to switch to .tar.xz
   so don't go from .tar.gz to .tar.bz; make sure to move to .tar.xz
 - default options are used for xz compression; requires about 9 MiB of
   memory to decompress (bz2 uses 3700KB)

For maintainers:
 - for your information only; you do not need to do anything
 - ftpadmin script will automatically handle conversion of compression
   formats
 - you can upload .tar.gz files after May 25th; ftpadmin will do the
   right thing
 - we might do a GNOME goal to ensure 'make dist' creates a .tar.xz file
   that's optional though


This has been suggested to the release-team and did not get any
objections. Still, if you have concerns, I'd like to hear about it. I've
set the reply-to to desktop-devel-list and distributor-list.

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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