> Presumably xz was chosen to begin with because of its high level of compression, migrating to zstd would make every single package considerably larger. Absol

> Presumably xz was chosen to begin with because of its high level of compression, migrating to zstd would make every single package considerably larger. Absolutely false because Zstandard didn't exist when xz was initially chosen. And the actual ratio difference is not that huge, generally less than 10% for most use cases, while the fastest level of xz is slower than most levels of zstd. (In fact, `dpkg-deb` uses `xz -6` by default because `-9` would be really expensive.) Given that zstd is also faster to decompress than xz as well, the ~10% increase is justifiable. > Lzip uses the same compression algorithm as xz, but is otherwise a simpler and better-designed format, without any of xz's bizarre countainer-inside-container design decisions. Lzip is not a better-designed format, it is just needlessly minimal for its use cases, much like xz's needless extensibility. I have detailed my own criticisms in the other comment [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873122