I think packaging ought to be able to use binary dependencies. Some
disagree. The binary ZStandard decompressor could be offered in a
gzip-compressed wheel.
The reason an
improved packaging format can only use ZStandard and not LZMA is that we
need to improve everyone's experience, not just minimize bandwidth.
LZMA can save a lot of bandwidth compared to gz and a tiny amount of
bandwidth compared to ZStandard. The package consumer won't care because
(LZMA download time + decompression time) will usually be greater than
(standard ZIP download time + decompression time). This is the same
reason other package formats like RPM have switched to ZStandard. At its
default settings ZStandard can achieve faster compression and
decompression times than gz / standard ZIP compression, and a better
compression ratio, at the same time.
In
other words if we used LZMA our consumers would be unhappy because it
would usually slow them down, to say nothing of the producers. Only the
most bandwidth constrained users would benefit.
ZStandard is generally faster and better than Brotli.