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The latest release is a year ago, the last commit is two months ago, and the build is failing. The claim “stronger than bzip2” is strange. What does it even me

by sedatk 10d ago

The latest release is a year ago, the last commit is two months ago, and the build is failing. The claim “stronger than bzip2” is strange. What does it even mean? Also, comparing parallel decompression benchmarks with bzip2 instead of pbzip2 seems unfair.

alerque 7d ago
If your basic single purposes tools are getting released every other day that might be a bad sign. The latest release being a year old for a tool like this is not something to worry about. As for your claim that "the build is failing", that is false, and it was false when you wrote this. The CI job for cross compiling to armv6 was failing, but all the other builds were green. You can still check CI status for older releases to confirm my assertion. Now armv6 is fixed too. Maybe dial back the FUD.
altairprime 10d ago
“for fairness, the benchmarks have been performed using single thread mode” (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902241
finaard 10d ago
Depends - if parallel decompression of any bzip3 archive is possible I'd consider it fair, if it requires special flags on archive creation I'd consider it unfair. I didn't see any description about that on that page. pbzip2 only can do parallel decompression on archives created with pbzip2, otherwise it'll fall back to single thread. There nowadays seems to be lbzip2, though, which claims to be able to add SMP support for standard bzip2 archives. I'll need to try that next time I'm working with large archives - I learned about the pbzip2 limitations the hard way last time I was shuffling around a few multi-10GB archives, and was trying to speed things up fully utilising my 32 core threadripper.
- sedatk 9d ago
  > pbzip2 only can do parallel decompression on archives created with pbzip2 Oh I didn’t know that.
spyc 9d ago
Please report any build errors in the GitHub issue tracker so that the isseu can be fixed for everyone. Thank you!

by sedatk 10d ago

alerque 7d ago

If your basic single purposes tools are getting released every other day that might be a bad sign. The latest release being a year old for a tool like this is not something to worry about. As for your claim that "the build is failing", that is false, and it was false when you wrote this. The CI job for cross compiling to armv6 was failing, but all the other builds were green. You can still check CI status for older releases to confirm my assertion. Now armv6 is fixed too. Maybe dial back the FUD.

altairprime 10d ago

“for fairness, the benchmarks have been performed using single thread mode” (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902241

finaard 10d ago

Depends - if parallel decompression of any bzip3 archive is possible I'd consider it fair, if it requires special flags on archive creation I'd consider it unfair. I didn't see any description about that on that page. pbzip2 only can do parallel decompression on archives created with pbzip2, otherwise it'll fall back to single thread. There nowadays seems to be lbzip2, though, which claims to be able to add SMP support for standard bzip2 archives. I'll need to try that next time I'm working with large archives - I learned about the pbzip2 limitations the hard way last time I was shuffling around a few multi-10GB archives, and was trying to speed things up fully utilising my 32 core threadripper.

sedatk 9d ago
> pbzip2 only can do parallel decompression on archives created with pbzip2 Oh I didn’t know that.

spyc 9d ago

Please report any build errors in the GitHub issue tracker so that the isseu can be fixed for everyone. Thank you!