[ Thanks to John D.
Rowell for this announcement. ]
This new stable version features improved performance
(10-25% faster) over version 0.9.5, better portability (on Unixes
and Win32) and support for large files (> 2Gb).
bzip2 (which generates .bz2 files) generally compresses files
better than gzip (.gz files), the default compression utility on
many Unixes, including GNU/Linux.
“bzip2 compresses files using the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting
text compression algorithm, and Huffman coding. Compression is
generally considerably better than that achieved by more
conventional LZ77/LZ78-based compressors, and approaches the
performance of the PPM family of statistical compressors. bzip2
is
built on top of code from libbzip2, a flexible library for
handling
compressed data in the bzip2 format.”
You can check the relevant links
and changes
history at AppWatch.com.