Re: gzip vs. bzip2

[Bruno Haible]

Eric Blake wrote:
> Lately, many packages ship both .gz and .bz2 tarballs, although automake 
> still 
> defaults to .gz only.  Is it time to more heavily encourage .bz2?

bzip2 is about 6 times slower upon decompression:

$ time gunzip -c < coreutils-6.9.tar.gz > /dev/null 
real    0m1.982s
user    0m1.924s
sys     0m0.040s
$ time bunzip2 -c < coreutils-6.9.tar.bz2 > /dev/null 
real    0m12.347s
user    0m12.197s
sys     0m0.074s

Therefore, for the purpose of "let's have a quick look at the sourcecode of
this or that package", .gz tarballs are better suited than .bz2 tarballs.
Those for whom a .bz2 tarball makes sense are those who download a package,
install it, and never again look at the sourcecode.

Guess on which side you find my sympathy...

Bruno