bzip2

Why are tar archive formats switching to xz compression to replace bzip2 and what about gzip?

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More and more tar archives use the xz format based on LZMA2 for compression instead of the traditional bzip2(bz2) compression. In fact kernel.org made a late “Good-bye bzip2” announcement, 27th Dec. 2013, indicating kernel sources would from this point on be released in both tar.gz and tar.xz format – and on the main page of the website what’s directly offered is in tar.xz.