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

[Markus Koschany]

On 02.05.2015 16:05, Jacob Nevins wrote:
>> 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 think it is an outdated and deprecated format.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.

Personally I don't perceive this as forced or an issue at all. Disk
space is cheap nowadays and xz has been around for a long time now. But
bz2 is history and obsolete and I prefer to build-depend only on really
required libraries. Debian already provides a lot of options other
distributions already don't care about. From my point of view the
documentation should be improved and it should be explained how the
compression format can be changed. This is mainly an upstream issue.

>> 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 don't think it is fair to blame downstream or the users for choosing
another compression format if it is provided so readily. If bz2
compression is mandatory, the build should fail without libz2-dev,
otherwise I assume this compression format is optional. At some point in
the future libraries become obsolete, that's the way of life. In this
case we are not talking about some obscure binary format but simply
about changing the compression from bz2 to gz or xz. Such a change is
not intrusive and only old savegames are affected.

> 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.

libbz2 is an important library but not essential thus every package has
to explicitly depend on it. Freeciv should report an error message to
users explaining that they have to manually change the compression
format to the desired format, if the engine is unable to handle it.
Freeciv should detect whether a compression is supported or not and show
an error message. Obviously this is a general problem because there
might be other distributions which have chosen different defaults than
Debian a long time ago.




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