Corrently Archlinux uses a tar+gzip combination and it works nicely.
But right now there's a stable lzma compression available using "tar Jcvf",
which could create much smaller packages and still fast decompressions.
(of course you need to have xz-utils)
think about all the bandwidth that could be saved !
my little experiment shows
kernel26-2.6.30-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz
coreutils-7.4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz
tar.gz
35338866 (100%)
4853937 (100%)
tar.xz
24892732 (70.4%)
1843592 (38.2%)
i guess one of the major concerns is that tar & gzip is more common than xz.
but since GNU is also packing their coreutils in xz packs, i guess that
a good time to switch?
