Ralph Eastwood said: > The introduction of bzip2 and xz always surprised me. Perhaps the > authors of those formats were the only ones that approached GNU to > have them included.
Actually GNU tar supports several compression tools: * gzip * xz * bzip2 * lzip * lzma * lzop * compress Bzip2 and xz-utils are merely most popular. Bzip2 was patent-free compression tools with best ratio for quite some time, and xz-utils most likely owe to popularity of 7-zip on Windows. (AFAIK it is also the tool providing the best compression ratio on UNIX now.) -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
