[tz] [PROPOSED PATCH 2/2] Use lz format for new tarball

[Russ Allbery]

Deborah Goldsmith <goldsmit at apple.com> writes:

> Maybe we should wait until lzip is widely available before adopting it?

> Meanwhile, bzip2 is already widely adopted, and is smaller than gzip.

My impression is that bzip2 is dying and offers no great advantages at
this point.  Those who are looking for the best compression are using
either xz or lzip.  Those who care primarily about backward compatibility
are using gzip.  bzip2 is falling between those two stools: it's much
newer than gzip and not as widely-supported, and it's larger (and I think
slower to decompress although I could be wrong) than either xz or lzip.

I would not introduce bzip2 into anything that wasn't already using it at
this point.

I think the current plan is a good one: stick with gzip for the supported,
stable distribution, add an experimental distribution that can play around
with compression and contents, and worry later (possibly much later) about
when the stable distribution might be worth changing.  At some point, gzip
will probably go the way of compress, but we're not there yet.  (It will
probably take longer than the replacement of compress with gzip took,
since there aren't patent issues driving the matter the way that there
were for compress.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>