https://svn.boost.org/trac10/ticket/7848 <p> you already have .gz tarballs, which is perfect for systems that don't yet support .xz (which at this time are little, any linux system i know supports it and probably even current macOS X releases) </p> <p> so the only reason for supplying bzip2 downloads must be for smaller storage/download time requirements. </p> <p> however, xz packs a lot better than bzip2, and bzip2 is a very slow (highly CPU-bound) to unpack algorithm. </p> <p> on average, extracting .xz is about 3.5 times faster than bzip2. </p> <p> /dev/shm $ time tar xf boost_1_52_0.tar.bz2 </p> <p> real 0m10.939s user 0m10.747s sys 0m1.390s /dev/shm $ tar cJf boost_1_52_0.tar.xz boost_1_52_0 boost_1_52_0/ boost_1_52_0.tar.bz2 /dev/shm $ time tar cJf boost_1_52_0.tar.xz boost_1_52_0 </p> <p> real 2m12.790s user 2m10.255s sys 0m3.822s /dev/shm $ rm -rf boost_1_52_0 /dev/shm $ time tar xf boost_1_52_0.tar.xz </p> <p> real 0m4.940s user 0m4.762s sys 0m1.232s /dev/shm $ la boost_1_52_0.tar.xz -rw-r--r-- 1 user users 47673912 Jan 4 10:17 boost_1_52_0.tar.xz /dev/shm $ la boost_1_52_0.tar.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 user users 54421709 Jan 4 10:14 boost_1_52_0.tar.bz2 </p> <p> this testing was done on a high-end 3.1 GHZ machine, and here the difference is that xz is more than 2 times faster, and the tarball 7 MB smaller. when using 2 distinct steps to create the .xz archive and invoking the xz compressor with -E (extreme), makes the tarball even smaller. </p> <p> i also build software regularly on mips and arm platforms in qemu. as an example, untarring the linux kernel sources provides as .bzip2 takes roughly 2 hours, but untarring the .xz archive "only" 30 minutes. </p> <p> so imo it makes much sense to deprecate .bz2 downloads and replace them with .xz. the .gz files need to stay in order to have a fallback for outdated platforms. </p> en-us /htdocs/site/boost.png https://svn.boost.org/trac10/ticket/7848 Trac 1.4.3 anonymous Sun, 24 Jul 2016 00:41:41 GMT https://svn.boost.org/trac10/ticket/7848#comment:1 https://svn.boost.org/trac10/ticket/7848#comment:1 <ul> <li><strong>keywords</strong> lzip added </li> </ul> <p> Lzip is a much better option. See <a class="ext-link" href="http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html"><span class="icon">​</span>http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html</a> and <a class="ext-link" href="http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html"><span class="icon">​</span>http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html</a> for example. </p> Ticket