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I think I may have missed part of this thread, so apologies if I'm
responding to a non-question:
The bzip2 program is a relatively new (it only reached version 1 a year
or so ago) compression program. It (usually) provides better
compression than gzip, at the cost of more processor time.
I think bzip2 should be in distributions as old as RH6.2, but may not be
installed by default - for example, even Debian's bleeding edge has its
priority set to "optional". Importantly, older versions of tar used
'-I' to mean "use bzip2 compression", whereas newer versions use '-j'.
This could cause scripts to be less portable - e.g. a script running
the command 'tar -jxvf file.tar.bz2' would only work with new versions
of tar, while 'tar -Ixvf file.tar.bz2' would only work with older
versions. Luckikly, the last time I looked, Poplog used 'zcat' to unzip
files, and 'bzcat' has remained constant for as long as I can remember.
I don't remember having seen anything being distributed _solely_ as a
bzip2 file before now, but many things (e.g. the Linux kernel) are
available in both gzip and bzip2 form.
If you want my opinion, I think everyone should be able to get hold of a
copy of bzip2 that works on their system, probably somewhere on the
media their distribution came on (perhaps on a secondary CD?). If
you're planning to use bzip2 in space-critical places, I'd suggest you
use it and document what's going on (as others have suggested).
Otherwise, it's probably best to use gzip by default and provide a
bzip2-based version if you can be bothered - depending on where you make
the file available from, you might be able to put download counters on
the files, so as to get evidence.
The official bzip2 homepage is at http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/
- Andrew
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