May 6, 2022
6:20 a.m.
On 5/5/22 09:18, Firas Khalil Khana wrote:
Why not use gzip for all?
gzip doesn't compress as well as lzip.
Or even better Zstandard for all?
Zstandard wasn't available when lzip was chosen, and it doesn't compress as well as lzip does. The tzdb tarball is intended for developers, where lzip's relative slowness in compression and decompression is unimportant. Also, the benefits of switching to a better compression algorithm need to be weighed against the maintenance hassle of adapting to the switch.