But both the lzip and xz file format is much simpler than the actual meat, the compressed stream format. I agree that xz has lots of redundant and useless bits,

But both the lzip and xz file format is much simpler than the actual meat, the compressed stream format. I agree that xz has lots of redundant and useless bits, but it is still simple enough to summarize in a single comment [1]. Lzip looks simple, but it actually uses a variant of LZMA stream format so it is not simpler to implement than xz since you can't even use a stock LZMA library. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873112