"The only reason to use bzip2 is if you must have both a smaller size than gzip and you can’t deploy xz there. If you don’t need the smaller size or the remote side can get xz then bzip2 is a waste. This applies to distributing source code tarballs as two formats, for instance. If you’re going to release in two formats, use tar.gz and tar.xz instead of tar.gz and tar.bz2."
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From a naive compression benchmark (his post doesn’t have a title). Nice benchmark.
I remember when bzip2 was impressive, and people yelled at you because you were using the old gzip. Now bzip2 isn’t that good, because there’s always someone faster in town.
