I read about
Ubuntu considering it for 13.04 and I think compressing with
XZ really makes a difference. When creating a tarball for Liferea 1.9.6 the following compression ratios can be achieved:
| Compression | Size | Extract Tarball With |
|---|
| uncompressed | 8,0MB | |
| make dist | 1,88MB | tar zxf ... |
| make dist-bzip2 | 1,35MB | tar jxf ... |
| make dist-zlma | 1,16MB | tar Jxf ... |
| make dist-xz | 1,14MB | tar Jxf ... |
XZ as well as zlma is supported by automake starting with
version 1.12. Also check
here for an in-depth speed and efficiency comparison of the Linux compression zoo.