2.9. RHEA-2010:0189: xz

A new package, xz, which provides user-space tools for compressing and decompressing files with the LZMA algorithm, is now available.

XZ Utils is an integrated collection of user-space file compression utilities based on the Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm (LZMA) compression algorithm. LZMA is a general purpose compression algorithm designed by Igor Pavlov as part of 7-Zip. It provides high compression ratio while keeping decompression times low.

The xz package includes liblzma, an LZMA library and API; xz, a shell tool for compressing files; and xzdec, a shell tool for de-compressing files. The liblzma API is similar to zlib's and the behavior of xz and xzdec will be familiar to users of gzip. Also, .xz files have similar properties to files produced by gzip and bzip2, making them easy for users familiar with these tools to work with. The LZMA algorithm, however, provides generally better compression ratios than these conventional tools. (BZ#519122)

Anyone interested in taking advantage of this new compression utility should install this new package.