From Fedora Project Wiki
Owner
Rahul Sundaram (mether)
Rationale
To avoid post import cleanup like the following
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-August/msg00563.html
I propose that we add a section to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/SourceURL that recommends packagers to pick the best source.
This will be a tip in the SourceURL page:
Smallest Compressed Archive
If the upstream source archive is available in multiple formats it's best to use the one that yields the smallest source rpm to save space on the mirrors and downloads of source RPM packages. xz/lzma compression (tar.xz or tar.lzma) is currently the best followed by bz2 (tar.bz2), gzipped tarballs (tar.gz) and finally zip archives.
If the upstream source archive is available in multiple formats it's best to use the one that yields the smallest source rpm to save space on the mirrors and downloads of source RPM packages. xz/lzma compression (tar.xz or tar.lzma) is currently the best followed by bz2 (tar.bz2), gzipped tarballs (tar.gz) and finally zip archives.