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