Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

[Julian Seward]

> bzip1 uses arithmetic encoding which is heavily patented.  bzip2 uses
> huffman instead, which isn't, but is slightly (10% is often quoted)
> less efficient.

It uses an adaptive huffman scheme devised by David Wheeler, which usually
gets within 1% of the arithmetic coder that bzip1 used.

bzip2, especially the 1.0.X series, is superior to bzip1 in terms of speed,
memory use, robustness against bad-case inputs, recoverability of data 
from damaged compressed streams, and that it can be used as a library.
Moving back to bzip1 would IMO be a big step backwards.

J
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