Rationale is as follows: * A stable version of xz-utils has been in the tree for a while and there are no bugs against it * xz compression is more effective than bzip2 * xz decompression is considerably faster than bzip2 Therefore, I think these would make for better defaults: PORTAGE_COMPRESS="xz" PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS="-6" Similarly, I think that lzma should be a pkginternal default for the current stable version of sys-apps/man: IUSE="+lzma nls" ... or for >=sys-apps/man-1.6f-r5 to be marked stable, because the change has already been made there (which, indirectly, could be taken as an endorsement of my suggestion).
the compression is not more effective with smaller files there was an older bug very similar to this, but i dont remember what it was
I couldn't find the bug in question so maybe it was closed. But, yeah, you're right. I tried it out with the /usr/share/{doc,man} directories from a recent stage3 tarball and using xz slightly increased the footprint, which is disappointing. So, it's good for tarballs and large files only. That'll teach me for not checking the stats. Closing.
np. i made the same mistake :P.
