I actually thought about recommending this a few weeks back but decided against it because the benefits didn't seem to outweigh the costs. The costs being longer decompression time (see below) and also what Hrvoje mentioned, departure from standards. bzip2 does offer slightly better compression ratios however. The following sizes are shown in kilobytes: 22991 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar 68570 xemacs-sumo-19981014.tar 6274 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar.gz 18504 xemacs-sumo-19981014.tar.gz 5277 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar.bz2 14558 xemacs-sumo-19981014.tar.bz2 However, bzip2 takes a bit longer to compress and quite a bit longer to uncompress the same file. Take the following timed examples from two machines, one fast, one slow. 600 MHz Alpha 21164, OSF1: gzip -9 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar 22,87s user 0,35s system 99% cpu 23,276 total bzip2 -9 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar 42,35s user 0,42s system 98% cpu 43,277 total gunzip xemacs-21.0-b57.tar.gz 1,30s user 0,42s system 97% cpu 1,753 total bunzip2 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar.bz2 13,07s user 0,60s system 96% cpu 14,205 total 166MHz Pentium, Linux: gzip -9 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar 74.52s user 2.11s system 93% cpu 1:21.72 total bzip2 -9 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar 136.45s user 1.99s system 94% cpu 2:27.16 total gunzip xemacs-21.0-b57.tar.gz 5.44s user 1.55s system 69% cpu 10.042 total bunzip2 xemacs-21.0-b57.tar.bz2 33.58s user 2.63s system 89% cpu 40.503 total Given these considerations I also think simultaneous gzip and bzip2 files are fine, but offering only bzip2 is a bit forceful. I'll cope either way though, the latest bzip2 built cleanly for me on Solaris.