Bug#784019: freeciv: removal of bz2 support => inability to load old savegames?

[Jacob Nevins]

> indeed I deliberately dropped support for bz2 compression because I
> think it is an outdated and deprecated format.
  [...]
> Debian's Freeciv package in stable is not affected and those who have
> old savegames are able to convert them to gz or xz simply by
> recompressing.

I don't see a reason to force people to do so. The location of savegames
and compression format is essentially invisible to many users.

> I can mention that in README.Debian but I really don't see the need
> for supporting three different compression formats.

Is there a significant cost to doing so?

Performance and technical arguments about the compression format are
germane to the creation of new files, but I don't think they trump
convenience and backward compatibility.

I'd have thought that libbz2 is likely to be installed on Debian systems
regardless of Freeciv's choice for some time to come.

I think the user experience will be poor; Freeciv doesn't handle
unsupported compression formats very well. From a quick hacked test, the
user will see the savegames listed in the client UI (without the .bz2
suffix) but it will fail to load without a good explanation.

Clearly this could be improved upstream, but I don't see any reason to
force players to jump through this hoop.