[tlbuild] zstd as package compressor

[Simon Dales]

Are we OT here?

On Tue, 2020-02-18 at 16:14 +1300, Henri Menke wrote:

> This is a massive speedup and it would be great if TeX Live could make
> use of this.  Of course there are different trade-offs to consider, such
> as the DVD size limit.

For how long will we be issuing an actual DVD?
* When will it be no-longer economic to press them?
* Won't most of us soon goto a netinstall, like with Linux?

Some of us, especially those with a site to maintain, might want a
single thing from which we can install locally. Does it have to be a
silver thing?

The DVD already doesn't include all the binaries, so those platforms
have to goto netinstall, or --custom-bin.

Arbitrarily(ish) large tarball? Hopefully if will fatten more slowly
than our increase in internet speeds/HDD sizes.

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Maybe a "DVD" with "scheme-all (most)", and then some kind of rsync to
fatten it up locally from the bigger net version.

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Linux distros have quite nice CLI/GUIs to manage the packages. You can
use apt-get/aptitude from the CL, or synaptic if you have X available.
"Update" gets the new current list of packages and their versions. You
select what you want and then it downloads/installs what you want.

Incidentally I did a test of making our installer work in lua. This has
some advantages, such as we know we have a young binary available, cos
that's part of the current distro. But not many cross-platform GUI libs
for lua (OTOH we don't have heavy requirements). Chief problem is to
port/rewrite it from the existing perl.

OTOH would such a port enable us to make a more net-friendly version?

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Or RPi the current install is glacial, so any speedup would be welcome.

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Simon