pbzip2 isn't faster

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 5, 2014, at 12:27, Chris Jones wrote:

> On 5 Apr 2014, at 06:02 pm, Rainer Müller wrote:
> 
>> Fedora is currently in the progress of switching to lbzip2. I don't
>> know how if this implementation is related to pbzip2, but the goals
>> sound similar.
>> 
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/lbzip2
>> 
>> We do not have a port for it yet, though.
> 
> Reading the web site, they claim lbzip2 can handle unzipping any bz2 file in parallel, unlike pbzip2. This seems like a distinct advantage, and given it seems well maintained, i think makes it a much better replacement possibility.

But lbzip2 is under the GPL-3 license, and Apple does not touch any software under that license. Perhaps that’s not a deal-breaker, but it would for example make it impossible for any Apple employees to examine or improve the lbzip2 code (and some MacPorts contributors are Apple employees).

pbzip2 on the other hand is under the BSD license, just as MacPorts is.

Being able to decompress any file in parallel, not just files created by the same utility, is nice, but the primary use case I see is faster compression and decompression of MacPorts binary packages, which pbzip2 should handle just fine, since, if we change MacPorts to include and use pbzip2, our binary packages will be created with the same utility.