Make more use of xz compression
Alpine has always been optimized for size, in order to reach small file sizes compression is used here and there. Currently the gzip compression algorithm is used for many things including:
- man pages
- the initramfs
- apk packages
- …
Many of these things can be compressed with xz these days. xz compression has proven to be more space efficient than gzip compression and in my opinion it would a good idea to use xz instead of gzip compression for some of the things listed above. Doing so would have many advantages for instance (among other things) it could result in an even smaller base system.
(from redmine: issue id 4984, created on 2016-01-03, closed on 2019-06-19)