[Piglit] [PATCH v3 3/3] framework: add support for bz2 compression.

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 7:50 PM, Dylan Baker <baker.dylan.c at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 07:34:46PM -0400, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
>> Seems easy enough to just add a generic "run shell command X"
>> compressor/decompressor... I always xz -9 piglit files, it gets
>> *great* compression.
>
> Well, if xz was supported in python2 I wouldn't have bothered with
> either gzip or bz2, since xz is clearly the best choice in most cases
> (although someone like Rob or Eric might prefer gzip since it's less CPU
> intensive). Also, pytho defaults to maximum compression level for all
> of the compression formats it supports.
>
> But as to why do it in python rather than running magic shell
> invocations for compressing/decompressing?
> 1) No magic shell invocations to remember, it "just works"
> 2) It's portable. Since it's all in python you don't have to worry about
>    whether your OS/machine has the right binaries or even supports the
>    right binaries, or if they're in your path, etc.
> 3) If you've already compressed your results you can drop the magic
>    shell invocations, and just point piglit at them. (I have a python 3
>    branch which does have xz support, and I can just point piglit at a
>    directory with an xz file in it and it works.)

Perhaps you misunderstood my comment. I meant why not have python call
out to 'xz' and whatnot, instead of using the built-in facilities. I
agree that it's nice to be cross-platform, but I don't think anyone
will cry if python2 on windows is missing xz.

  -ilia