Compress::Bzip2 2.08 has been released. Features: ========= * built on top of bzip2 1.0.2 * extensive set of unit tests. * a new file I/O interface with bzopen, bzread, bzwrite, bzclose, etc. * a new stream interface. * compatibility with Compress::Bzip2 1.03 * a Compress::Zlib clone interface, so that programs built for Compress::Zlib should work with Compress::Bzip2 with no changes, simply replace use Compress::Zlib; with use Compress::Bzip2 qw(:gzip); * includes bzip2 1.0.2 source code, so that it will build on systems without bzip2 installed. The build process tests for the presence of a useable installation of bzip2. If none is found, the internal source code is used. If bzip2 is not installed in a standard location, the correct location can be specified either with environment variables or with a config file. Bug fixes: ========== * previous versions were either not functional or not interoperable with bzip2 when dealing with files larger than the internal buffer size (100k to 900k). The 2.x series uses the logical eof rollover method described in the bzip2 docs. What is Bzip2 ? =============== Bzip2 is a portable lossless data compression library written in ANSI C. It offers pretty fast compression and fast decompression. Bzip2 has very good results, if you want to compress ASCII Documents. Bzip2 is probably not great for streaming compression. It fills it's internal buffer, which depending of parameters is between 100k and 900k in size, before it outputs ANY compressed data. It works best compressing an entire document. Streaming decompression on the other hand, gives a steady torrent of bytes.