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
