app-arch/pbzip2 does a lovely, automatic job of using multiple CPU cores for decompression, when available. In my experience, it's a drop-in replacement for bzip2.
bzip2 is in the system set. If the Gentoo community would like to replace bzip2 with pbzip2 in @system, then the stages will pick that up instead. Unfortunately, we cannot decide that in a bug report. Instead, it needs to be taking up with the community on the mailing lists. Feel free to bring up the topic. Thanks for understanding.
Which list?
(In reply to comment #2) > Which list? gentoo-dev maybe?
Subscribed. I'll wait a while to get the vibe of the list before I start posting.
*** Bug 443828 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Status is Resolved/Wontfix. Does this mean that it is decided to keep old bzip/gzip and such? Like first post says, I have used pbzip2 as drop-in replacement (by symlinking old bzip2/bunzip2) for a few months without any issues. I guess that in many cases, tar is using libarchive and not external programs by default. It is possible to use tar with external programs, however, this would probably need some changes to portage?
It was resolved as "wontfix" because it was decided that a bug report was not the appropriate place for the discussion. The discussion eventually happened on the -dev mailing list: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/80449
