Xz format inadequate for general use

(2016); and used to be "Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving", but apparently the author's opinion of the xz format has worsened.

Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39871914 - Mar 2024 (26 comments)

Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868810 - Mar 2024 (9 comments)

Xz format considered inadequate for long-term archiving (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210438 - Jul 2022 (158 comments)

Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103255 - Jun 2019 (58 comments)

Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16884832 - Apr 2018 (136 comments)

Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12768425 - Oct 2016 (91 comments)

As always when this is posted: this is quite overstated. If you're only using .xz on something already protected by a sha2sum or something, and you trust the source, almost all of this is immediately invalidated (and the rest is "whatever, good enough").

Now, "trust the source" does have a hole that most people might not think about - are you sure the archive you just created corresponds to the files you tried to add? Doing extraction comparison tests should be mandatory ... but the same applies to all other archive formats, and very few tools automate the check in a way that also generates the hash.

I have to cringe every time this article is brought up, because while xz does have made some questionable design choices, it practically works well and doesn't do anything fundamentally inadaquate as a compression file format [1]. And yet about a half of this article is devoted to the xz's inadaquateness as an archival format for which xz was never designed (use a properly designed archival format if you want). At this point lzip should be avoided because of this article. Sigh.

[1] Refers to file formats like .gz, .bz2 and of course .xz; doesn't include .tar, .zip or .7z.

Nonetheless, xz has the best sshd integration.

The out-of-context quotes by Tony Hoare are at least questionable.

if i need xz i'll just use zstd instead.

Most of these are not really serious issues in the real world. It's been critiqued extensively in the past (posted those discussions in a separate comment) and I'll not repeat it here. But I will add that lzip's "yo, here's a tarball, trust me bro"-model of distribution is no longer fit for 2025, for reasons that should be obvious. In my opinion this blows any concerns about xz out of the water. Technically this is about formats and not implementations, both de-facto have one dominant implementation, so that's a bit of an academic distinction.

Anyway, zstd is the future for most use cases.

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At 3 points and 0 comments it can't be HN?