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Isn't bzip used quite a bit, especially for tar files?
by jimktrains2 1y ago
Isn't bzip used quite a bit, especially for tar files?
- jeffbee 1y agoIf so, only by misguided users. Why would anyone choose bz2 in 2025?
- 0x457 1y agoTo unpack an archive made from the time when bz2 was used?
- ben-schaaf 1y agoOf course no one uses systems, tools and files created before 2025!
- jeffbee 1y agobzip2 hasn't been the best at anything in at least 20 years.
- appreciatorBus 1y agoThe same could be said of many things that, nonetheless, are still used by many, and will continue to be used by many for decades to come. A thing does not need to be best to justify someone wanting to make it a bit better.
- MBCook 1y agoI use plain old zip files almost every day. “Best” is measured along a lot more axis than just performance. And you don’t always get to choose what format you use. It may be dictated to you by some 3rd party you can’t influence.
- Twirrim 1y agoSo? If I need to consume a resource compressed using bz2, I'm not just going to sit around and wait for them to use zstd. I'm going to break out bz2. If I can use a modern rewrite that's faster, I'll take every advantage I can get.
- kbolino 1y agobzip2 is still pretty good if you want to optimize for: - better compression ratio than gzip - faster compression than many better-than-gzip competitors - lower CPU/RAM usage for the same compression ratio/time This is a niche, but it does crop up sometimes. The downside to bzip2 is that it is slow to decompress, but for write-heavy workloads, that doesn't matter too much.
- Philpax 1y agoThe Wikipedia data dumps [0] are multistream bz2. This makes them relatively easy to partially ingest, and I'm happy to be able to remove the C dependency from the Rust code I have that deals with said dumps. [0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...