On 06/02/10 22:49, Linus Torvalds wrote:
quoted text
> Oh, and I forgot to ask one thing I had intended to ask in the release
> notes..
>
> Do people really care about the old-fashioned tar.gz and patch.gz files?
> I've always uploaded the tar-files and patches compressed with gzip,
> because that's the "traditional" way, and then we have a script that also
> re-compresses things as 'bz2' because it compresses better and many people
> are bandwidth-limited and much prefer the better compression.
>
> Of course, if you really care about bandwidth, you're better off just
> fetching the git trees instead, but the question for non-git users is:
>
>     Would it be ok to _only_ have the 'bz2' patches and tar-balls?
>
> Having two copies of every large file seems silly, if nobody really
> requires the traditional .gz format..

For reference, we've stopped releasing bz2 files for the coreutils project.
We use gz for compatibility and xz for increased compression ratio/decompression speed.

$ rpm -q xz gzip bzip2
xz-4.999.9-0.1.beta.20091007git.fc11.i586
gzip-1.3.12-10.fc11.i586
bzip2-1.0.5-5.fc11.i586

$ bzip2 -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.bz2 | xz > linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz
$ xz -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz | gzip > linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.gz
$ l
-rw-rw-r-- 1 padraig 66,191,954 Feb  6 22:27 linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 padraig 56,347,392 Feb  9 11:17 linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 padraig 85,300,209 Feb  9 11:20 linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.gz

$ time bzip2 -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.bz2 >/dev/null
real    0m30.132s
$ time gzip -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.gz >/dev/null
real    0m4.996s
$ time xz -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz >/dev/null
real    0m11.003s

cheers,
Pádraig.
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