Introducing LZMA and XZ Compression Algorithms

I was testing Ubuntu 9.04 in tar.lzma. It compresses more but is slower compared to compress zip and tar.gz Question:
1 .- Do you know if tar.lzma and zx are stable enough to work and recommend them?
2 .- Any chance that unseating tar.gz as a favorite in the upcoming Linux distributions?
3 .- What if he comes by default with Ubuntu 9.10?
Thanks for your article, the truth is I I did not know these Compressions Algorithms.

P.D: Sorry for my english. I would like spanish softpedia. =)

- Yes they are stable enough to work with them. However, tar.lzma is no longer developed, it has been replaced by tar.xz. This is the future of Linux archiving!
- As you can see in the screenshot above, if tar.xz is selected, it will be the default for all the archives you'll create.
- There is no default compression algorithm for Ubuntu. They are all available, so you can extract every possible archive.

This article is pure propaganda of two bad file formats.
The lzma_alone file format (.lzma) lacks file type information (magic bytes) and integrity checking. So, if you value your data, don't use it.
Xz is not yet stable, and the xz file format is so convoluted that even its own developer uses it inconsistently (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lzip-bug/2009-10/msg00012.html).
Next time, before "instructing" others in the ways of Linux, please, document yourself a little better.

Dear Antonio, the article is NOT for people like you, experts in Linux, it is ONLY for beginners... for users that will (probably) download software from our website, archives such as tar.lzma and tar.xz, and they will have no idea what to do with them.

"we strongly suggest to use the newer XZ (xz-utils package in Ubuntu) compression software for your daily archiving tasks."

It sounds like you're doing exactly what Antonio suggets.

xz must not be that bad if Slackware is using it as the primary compression algorithm for its packages in the latest versions of the distro. Slackware is known for its resistance to change in favor of its philosophy and stability, so that's saying something.

Either way, I've tried both .lzma and .xz, and they both seem similar. They both take a while to compress, but compress very well. It seemed that, with the default settings, the lzma command line tool compresses slightly better (but quite a bit slower) than the equivalent xz command. I timed it, using the time command, with the same file--the 11GB binary file compressed to 2.0 with LZMA, 2.1 with xz. Times (real) were 311m44.798s for LZMA and 226m56.551s for xz. Yes, it was the exact same file (used the -k switch), so any fragments while compressing with one program had to be dealt with in the other as well for fairness.

It does seem like xz is still in development, which is both bad (still not "complete" like its ancient cousins gzip and bzip2) and good (even gzip and bzip needed years of development to get where they both are today!). For example, its man page mentions a "list" feature, which it says will be mapped to the -l switch, but it has not been implemented. I'll just say, based on the pure functionality of this thing (just read through its man page for the list of features and switches), I'm impressed so far with xz. I like it.

Of course... and now Ubuntu 10.10 has xz and lzma installed by default... maybe Antonio realizes now that XZ is good for everyone... :|

I downloaded the xz package with yum, but I didn't seem to get any man pages with it.
I worked out what I needed to do by running xz --help.
One would hope to eventually have a command line switch for tar, like you do for gzip/gunzip, but I don't know what letter you will use!!

"One would hope to eventually have a command line switch for tar, like you do for gzip/gunzip, but I don't know what letter you will use!!"

tar already has it, it's -J. From man tar:

-j, --bzip2

-J, --xz