On Wednesday, 5 June 2013 at 17:24:56 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
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.
If I were you, I'd assume that the Arch Linux devs have done
their homework, and xz actually compresses a typical package
better than bzip2 does.
And indeed, when I compared different compression formats to
figure out how to distribute the LDC binary packages, I found
that xz compresses our packages quite a bit better than bzip2
does, while being faster at *de*compressing, which is what
matters for users.
As far as compression speed goes, I actually find it to be mostly
irrelevant for packaging binary releases: I don't care whether
the archive creation part of my scripts takes 5 or 50 seconds to
run, uploading the archives probably takes longer anyway, unless
I'm on the university internet connection.
David
