On Wednesday, June 05, 2013 19:13:46 Joakim wrote: > On Monday, 3 June 2013 at 21:18:54 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > > Also does ".tar.gz" vs ".tar.bz2" matter? I understand that the > > latter > > (if I spelled it right) is newer and better compression, but > > any reason > > that it might *need* to be one or the other? > > I'd look at xz, it's increasingly becoming the standard packaging > format for open source distros: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xz#Uses > > It usually compresses the tightest and decompresses the fastest, > while beating bzip2 on compression time.
In my experience, xz has way worse compression time than bzip2, and on smaller files, it actually compresses worse. Where xz shines are large files. It definitely beats out bzip2 by a fair bit there. But as it loses at small files (which distro packages usually are), it seems very off to me that Arch Linux switched to used xz from gzip. It would have made for more sense to switch to bzip2. I we split the dmd zip, I question that it would be large enough for xz to compress better than bzip2. And I don't think that xz is supported as well in general as gzip or bzip2. So, I doubt that switching to xz is a good idea. - Jonathan M Davis
