Re: Could distributed tarballs be compressed with xz instead of bzip2?

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 01 Feb 2012, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

>> On the other hand, a cursory glance at the xz manual page indicates
>> that xz may have rather extreme memory requirements: Several gigabytes
>> in some cases! Is that something to worry about?

> I looked a bit more carefully, and it seems there is little reason to
> worry, at least if compression is done with the default setting (-6).
> Even with compression level at -9, the memory requirement for
> decompression is only 65 MiB, which is not a problem on modern
> computers (though I think many emacs users are still on quite old
> hardware). I guess the extreme memory requirements come from unusual
> combinations of the many flags affecting the detailed operations of
> the compression algorithm, and should be of little concern for regular
> use.

I'd stay with the default setting of -6. The amount of memory required
for unpacking increases from 9 MB to 65 MB when going from -6 to -9.
Being somewhat conservative is probably better than risking any
trouble on embedded systems.