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> That's irrelevant to the file formats themselves, however. A simple file format doesn't automatically guarantee a simple implementation,

Maybe it doesn't guarantee it, but at least a simple format makes it possible.

A complex format makes it impossible to have a simply implementation.

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But both the lzip and xz file format is much simpler than the actual meat, the compressed stream format. I agree that xz has lots of redundant and useless bits, but it is still simple enough to summarize in a single comment [1]. Lzip looks simple, but it actually uses a variant of LZMA stream format so it is not simpler to implement than xz since you can't even use a stock LZMA library.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873112

only in indirect way - simpler format could allow to find another real maintainer *or even continue to maintain it himself), because it has less features.

but I think xz won the linux-lzma-archive formats war exactly because it was more complex than lzip, e.g. by supporting more versatile lzma2 format, which allowed to implement multi-threaded compression and decompression (pretty sophisticated things), and better crc64/sha256 hash checking

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