Re: Steering committee, please, consider using lzip instead of xz

[Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio at gnu dot org>]

Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> > http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html#fragmented
>
> You keep referencing the marketing pages of one of the formats comparing to
> other formats, that can be hardly considered unbiased.  Most of the
> compression formats have similar kind of pages, usually biased as well.

The above article is intended to be a serious (and as unbiased as 
possible) analysis of the xz format. AFAIK, this is the only analysis of 
the xz format ever written. I can't find anything similar in the xz 
site[1], the bzip2 site[2], nor in any of the two gzip sites[3][4]. All 
the formats document their file format and usually offer some kind of 
benchmark, but that is all. If you know of any such analysis, specially 
of xz or lzip, please share it.

[1] http://tukaani.org/xz/
[2] http://www.bzip.org/
[3] http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/
[4] http://www.gzip.org/

BTW, writing such an in-dept analysis is a lot of work, and it hurts 
when someone describes it as "marketing" without verifying it first. If 
anybody finds any error or inaccuracy in the above article I'll be happy 
to correct it. Thanks.


> The choice of xz is that it is used very widely these days, which is
> not the case of lzip.

IMHO It is pretty obvious that whatever format is chosen to distribute 
the code of a major project (GCC, coreutils, linux) will become widely 
used, and in the meanwhile the users without support for the new format 
can fall back to the .gz tarball, which is not so much larger than the 
current bzip2 tarball.


Best regards,
Antonio.