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maybe it was preference at first, some people finding it annoying to deal with cpio's file list, and it built up to the modern stuff like builtin integration wi
by jan6 6y ago
maybe it was preference at first, some people finding it annoying to deal with cpio's file list, and it built up to the modern stuff like builtin integration with compressors (probably coinciding with tar.gz becoming the de facto *nix archive)?
I personally find xz and cpio both cool, despite both being barely used ;)
- jhoechtl 6y agoXZ used to be the compression format for many Linux packages in many distros (at least Arch based) and has only lately been replaced by ZStd. How do you come to the conclusion that xz is barely used?
- ComputerGuru 6y agoI definitely would not say zstd has replaced xz, but it is on its way too. I'm not sure it is even the best replacement because the needs of packages differ from the strengths of zstd. Zstd is designed to optimize for both compression and decompression (i.e. It does neither spectacularly but has very good/pareto trade offs) while packages are very much written once and read many times. If xz weren't so memory intensive to decompress it would be a good choice (ie it's not a good choice), but I feel like there is still a better option out there that approaches the problem from a "optimize for size at the expense of heavy compression costs" and zstd is not it