> hmmm i'd say no in general [*]; we support building .bz2 versions
   > of packages and we should do it for base - it _has_ been the plan
   > to switch to bz2 distros hasn't it?  just never done?  :-)
   
   Has it? bz2 is really, really, really slow on our older architectures,
   compared to gzip.


when bzip2 was added to the base distro, that's what i recall being
said.  for our non-slower architectures, that 10-20% savings in
distribution size helps the constant bloat with eg cd & dvd images.

i think because of the older platforms it was never going to be an
required change, just optional....but it's never gotten that far yet :)