The claim “stronger than bzip2” is strange. What does it even mean?
Also, comparing parallel decompression benchmarks with bzip2 instead of pbzip2 seems unfair.
pbzip2 only can do parallel decompression on archives created with pbzip2, otherwise it'll fall back to single thread. There nowadays seems to be lbzip2, though, which claims to be able to add SMP support for standard bzip2 archives.
I'll need to try that next time I'm working with large archives - I learned about the pbzip2 limitations the hard way last time I was shuffling around a few multi-10GB archives, and was trying to speed things up fully utilising my 32 core threadripper.
Oh I didn’t know that.
As for your claim that "the build is failing", that is false, and it was false when you wrote this. The CI job for cross compiling to armv6 was failing, but all the other builds were green. You can still check CI status for older releases to confirm my assertion. Now armv6 is fixed too.
Maybe dial back the FUD.