Thoughts on switching our archive compression method

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 22, 2020, at 13:28, Vincent Habchi wrote:

>> (xz is 85% of bz2 size)
>> (xz is 70% of bz2 size)
>> (xz is 57% of bz2 size)
>> 
>> So I think we could save ourselves and our mirror providers, CDN, and users some disk space and bandwidth by switching to xz. bz2 was the best available built-in compression on Mac OS X 10.6 when we started doing binary archives but there are better options now.
> 
> I agree wholeheartedly, but since you mention modern compression algorithms, isn’t there another one (or more) which would be yet more efficient than xz?

Maybe, but if we could use something built into macOS, like xz on 10.9 and later, then we wouldn't need to bundle yet another third-party project (the decompression program) into MacPorts base.