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lzip? Not sure how closely commentators have read to have missed this (obviously plugged by the author) choice... You are not getting compatibility out of xz,
by smaudet 4y ago
lzip? Not sure how closely commentators have read to have missed this (obviously plugged by the author) choice...
You are not getting compatibility out of xz, not even with itself, if you cared about maximum compatibility you'd be using zip (understood and supported by all major OS at this point), and it sounds like if you just cared about compression ratio you'd use lzip...
If it was speed, I could see zstd (or maybe bzip2? not sure how it stacks up), or just compatibility with linux/embedded folks, gzip. The use case for XZ seems actually pretty marginally small, its like holding onto .rar files or some obscure file splitting tool...
- ars 4y agoI don't need compatibility with other machines, I just need to know that in 20 years I'll be able to decompress my files. lzip might get there eventually, but it's not there now. xz has enough usage behind it that I'm not concerned. bzip2 has enough usage but the compression ratio is worse. zstd has neither the usage nor the ratio.
- smaudet 4y ago> I just need to know that in 20 years I'll be able to decompress my files The way the author was talking I wouldn't be sure that's even true, if the authors are mucking about with the container format and xz makes some non-compatible breaking change, you may not even know you can't open old xz files with the new version (it reads versions based upon heuristics rather than a version number, IIRC from the article).