zstd and Mercurial packaging

Gregory Szorc gregory.szorc at gmail.com
Tue Nov 22 20:53:53 UTC 2016


Mercurial 4.1 has native support for zstd, a relatively new (and awesome)
compression library.

For reasons explained in the commit messages at
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/2e484bdea8c4 and
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/rev/b86a448a2965, the zstd library
and python-zstandard Python bindings to it are now vendored in the
Mercurial repository and their sources will be distributed with the
Mercurial 4.1 release.

I know this has implications for packagers, some of whom have policies that
prefer "unbundling" dependencies.

zstd has some compelling performance advantages over zlib (the current
default compression engine). So having downstream Mercurial distributions
support zstd out of the box should be in the best interest of Mercurial
users.

I'm sending this email to reach out to packagers so we have time to address
packaging concerns around zstd. I'm willing to make upstream changes to
both Mercurial and python-zstandard to ease packaging issues. Please read
the aforementioned commit messages to understand the vendoring decision and
then let me know if there is anything I can do to make your life easier.

Gregory
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