Jakub Jelinek wrote:
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html#fragmented
You keep referencing the marketing pages of one of the formats comparing to
other formats, that can be hardly considered unbiased. Most of the
compression formats have similar kind of pages, usually biased as well.
The above article is intended to be a serious (and as unbiased as
possible) analysis of the xz format. AFAIK, this is the only analysis of
the xz format ever written. I can't find anything similar in the xz
site[1], the bzip2 site[2], nor in any of the two gzip sites[3][4]. All
the formats document their file format and usually offer some kind of
benchmark, but that is all. If you know of any such analysis, specially
of xz or lzip, please share it.
[1] http://tukaani.org/xz/
[2] http://www.bzip.org/
[3] http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/
[4] http://www.gzip.org/
BTW, writing such an in-dept analysis is a lot of work, and it hurts
when someone describes it as "marketing" without verifying it first. If
anybody finds any error or inaccuracy in the above article I'll be happy
to correct it. Thanks.
The choice of xz is that it is used very widely these days, which is
not the case of lzip.
IMHO It is pretty obvious that whatever format is chosen to distribute
the code of a major project (GCC, coreutils, linux) will become widely
used, and in the meanwhile the users without support for the new format
can fall back to the .gz tarball, which is not so much larger than the
current bzip2 tarball.
Best regards,
Antonio.
