[R-SIG-Mac] zstd/xz compressed macos binaries

[Simon Urbanek]

Gábor,


> On 20 Sep 2026, at 20:24, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Just saw that (some of?) the new macOS binaries for R 4.6 are zstd compressed:
> 
> ❯ curl -LO
> https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/macosx/sonoma-arm64/contrib/4.6/knitr_1.52.tgz
> 
> ❯ file knitr_1.52.tgz
> knitr_1.52.tgz: Zstandard compressed data (v0.8+), Dictionary ID: None
> 


Ah, no, thanks, that's a bug, likely resulting from earlier updates where we were experimenting with using zstd for 4.7 binaries, but that didn't go well since stock macOS bsdtar cannot handle them. The 4.6 binaries should be gzip as usual.


> OTOH the new 4.7 binaries are xz compressed, with a new file name scheme:
> https://mac.r-project.org/bin/macos/arm64/contrib/4.7/
> 
> Is this what we can expect for the near future, gz/zstd in .tgz for 4.6 and
> xz in .tar.xz starting from 4.7, or this might still change?
> 


I just sent the announcement, so, yes, tar.xz is the plan for 4.7, but nothing should change for 4.6 and earlier (and nothing will change for the x86_64 big sur builds, either).

Thanks,
Simon