Re: Future releases as tar.bz2 and tar.xz

[Allan Duncan <amd2345 fastmail com au>]

On 18/01/10 07:59, Christopher Roy Bratusek wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> nothing special, just some news:
>
> all future releases will be available as tar.bz2 and tar.xz.
> XZ is also known as LZMA2 and has a much better compression than bz2.
>
> For example Sawfish 1.6.1:
>
> du -h sawfish-1.6.1.tar.{xz,bz2}
> 2,4M sawfish-1.6.1.tar.xz
> 3,6M sawfish-1.6.1.tar.bz2
>
> So this is -30%, which helps saving bandwith and stuff. Though not
> necessary for most people, but in non-industrial countries (or in
> non-urban regions) there are a lot people who can't access DSL (and
> flatrates).
>
> Chris

Of course the compression comes at a cost - it really chews CPU time.
For those using GNU tar, the man page is less than helpful, use:
    tar --xz -cf <archive.tar.xz> <source>
If there is an abbreviated option I can't see it.
Extraction/listing
    tar -xf <archive.tar.xz>
    tar -tf <archive.tar.xz>