Could we use something better than zip for the dmd package?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, December 23, 2011 18:24:09 Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Friday, 23 December 2011 at 17:13:25 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
> 
> wrote:
> > Interestingly, in my experience, 7z seems to even beat .tar.bz2
> > by a non-trivial amount.
> 
> Slackware Linux recently changed from the old .tar.gz for it's
> distribution to .tar.xz - .xz uses the same algorithm as 7zip.
> 
> I never cared much for bz2 myself. It's slightly better than gzip,
> but it comes at the cost of being slow as crap.
> 
> xz seems ok on speed and pretty good at compressing though.

In my experince, bzip2 gives comparable or better compression on smaller files 
(a few MB) but xz gives better compression on larger ones (e.g. your whole 
Linux install). However, I've also found xz to be _way_ worse on speed. Arch  
also switched from tar.gz to tar.xz not terribly long ago, and I really think 
that they should have juts been using tar.bz2, since unless the results that 
I've seen are abnormal, they're not getting any real benefit out of xz over 
bzip2 in terms of size (if anything, it's probably worse given the small size 
of most packages) and it's way worse in speed.

- Jonathan M Davis