RFC#8 - bzip2

[Ed White <ed@overminder.com>]

Request to import bzip2 in the official src tree.

Reading /policy.html and looking at the src tree layout is clear that GPLed 
software is used only if there aren't alternative ways.
Looking at bzip2 I found out that this software seems to have a full 
compatible license and it gives better compression than gzip.
It is already used by some ports to decompress distfiles and could give a lot 
of advantages (RFC#9).

Look at how many Mbytes you could save downloading 3.3 snapshots:

base33 (tgz) 30903567 (bz2) 24120264
comp33 (tgz) 16590617 (bz2) 13837916
etc33 (tgz) 1500604 (bz2) 1232789
man33 (tgz) 6128578 (bz2) 4685742
misc33 (tgz) 1748521 (bz2) 1712209

In this case a patch to pax/tar should be developed, but a pipe can work in 
the meantime.
Obviously also packages could be built using bzip2 saving again a lot of 
bandwidth and storage space.

However, all this ways of using bzip2 are only examples, at the moment I'm 
only saying that bzip2 seems to have a better license and performance than 
gzip, so I'm asking to include it in the dafult src tree.


        Ed


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