> Typically, other archives like .tar.bz2 can be smaller. But those aren’t backwards-compatible!

Is there any point for (new) .bz2 archives in the era of Zstd?

j16sdiz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tooling ?

It takes years for bzip2 be in every Linux Distro, and we _still_ doing gzip.

LZMA / xz tool are start to get more support, but they are nowhere near universal.

No idea when how long zstd will need.

	▲	strenholme 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		xz is pretty universal across POSIX and clones though. It comes with any modern Linux distro, Busybox even has an .xz decompressor, so `tar xvJF file.tar.xz` does the right thing in *NIX land, which I presume includes MacOS with Brew. For Windows systems, 7-zip (.7z, similar compression to .xz) is a free download for Windows 10, and Windows 11 can open up a .7z file with a simple double click. .zip and .gz no longer need to be used here in 2026.

Debian? Did they discover it yet?