[rlpb]

xz makes sense for Debian. The article author links to a Debian mailing list thread as if that somehow provides evidence that Debian made a bad decision. I just read the thread and that is the opposite of that thread's conclusion. The consensus in that thread is that Debian's existing use of xz is just fine for its own purposes.

Debian uses external cryptographic verification for its packages and apt archives so it does not need additional robustness in the compression format.