LZMA and XZ Binaries
Update August 2011: Official Windows XZ binaries are now provided at the official website so I am no longer offering them here.
Previously I had predicted that LZMA
tarballs were the future. I'd like to make a slight correction to
this: XZ tarballs are the
future! LZMA has actually already been supplanted by the newer LZMA2
algorithm, which is most directly accessed with the xz
tool from XZ Utils. So look out for .tar.xz in the
future.
Right now I believe that XZ will get you the smallest compression of
any general purpose compressor (at a large memory cost). When combined
with tar it even beats
out 7z.
Like all productive computer activity on the Windows platform, dealing
with LZMA or XZ tarballs is needlessly difficult in
Windows. Archive software, such
as 7-zip, doesn't seem to handle
them directly yet. They can read
the underlying tar layer but the
compression layer seems to be opaque. 7-zip actually uses the LZMA and
LZMA2 algorithms internally, so it's 99% of the way there. They just
never did the last step. Update: the beta version of 7-zip can
read these archives.
So here's where the above executable, provided for your convenience,
comes in: xz.exe was cross-compiled in Debian GNU/Linux
using the MinGW compiler suite,
and it can perform both compression and decompression on both XZ and
LZMA. You can use these to pull out the tar archive so
that it can be accessed using the regular tools. Or you can use it to
make your own highly compact archives.
