Investigate feasibility of offering .tar.xz archives in addition to .tar.gz

[petecooper]

.tar.xz arguably offers some benefits in the form of better compression, which means smaller archives, which means fewer bytes transferred through the pipes.

In my limited testing, it is computationally more expensive to make a .tar.xz file, compared to a .tar.gz file of the same contents, but a mantra of 'do it the right way once and many people will benefit' would be a sensible thing to bear in mind.

Targeted at 4.9, not a blocker for 4.8.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/108103

[petecooper]

Technicals (untested):

tar --xz -cf textpattern-$VER.tar.xz $DESTDIR
shasum -a 256 textpattern-$VER.tar.xz > textpattern-$VER.tar.xz.SHA256SUM

NTS: should be after the .zip and .tar.gz bundling because it takes a long time.

[petecooper]

Closing for now, not viable given the benefits.