As you probably know, bzip2 compresses significantly better than gzip, and so is starting to supplant it just as gzip replaced compress. GNU tar 1.12 supports gzip (with the z option), but does not support bzip2. Making it also support bzip2 (with the analagous y option) is trivial (there are a dozen independent versions of the patch floating around the web) and very useful. Many of us have to reapply this patch every time we install Red Hat. It would be save a lot of work if Red Hat would apply it once to their tar rpm. The easier it is for everyone to use bzip2, the more bandwidth we all save.
Can someone supply a reasonable patch (or pointer) for bzip2 support in tar?
Here's one version of the patch. It's in the mini-HOWTO, so it's probably the most used. http://www.linuxhq.com/HOWTO/mini/Bzip2-4.html
Fixed (by upgrading) in tar-1.12-10.64011. Thanks for the pointer.
Reopened because tar-1.12-64013 does not support bzip2 and the maintainer does not wish to include bzip2 support using -y.
*** Bug 3668 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** Red Hat Linux still ships with no bzip2 support (by default). This is a major annoyance to those of us with slow connections and who prefer to download the smaller tarballs, and a "bug" that's so easy to fix -- just add the bzip2 package as one of the default components and compile tar with bzip2 support built in.
You can use the --use option to specify a compression program...
Fixed (again) in tar-1.13.6-1.
QA testing for tar-1.13.11-1.i386.rpm: (lorax) I am able to use bzip2 to create and extract archive: # tar cf foo.tar.bzip2 --bzip2 foo # tar xf foo.tar.bzip2 --bzip2