Re: Could distributed tarballs be compressed with xz instead of bzip2?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

[Harald Hanche-Olsen <address@hidden> (2012-02-01 09:31:13 UTC)]

> On the other hand, a cursory glance at the xz manual page indicates
> that xz may have rather extreme memory requirements: Several gigabytes
> in some cases! Is that something to worry about?

I looked a bit more carefully, and it seems there is little reason to
worry, at least if compression is done with the default setting (-6).
Even with compression level at -9, the memory requirement for
decompression is only 65 MiB, which is not a problem on modern
computers (though I think many emacs users are still on quite old
hardware). I guess the extreme memory requirements come from unusual
combinations of the many flags affecting the detailed operations of
the compression algorithm, and should be of little concern for regular
use.

- Harald