tar bzip2 and the -y option
 

This is puzzling me, I was wondering if anyone knew of a good reason for this...
For a brief period in time there was a y option for tar which meant process input/output through bunzip2/bzip2. It was analogous to the -z option for gzip. For example:

tar yxf somefile.tar.bz2

would work (and may still work depending on your distro) similar to:

tar zxf somefile.tar.gz

looking at the changelog for tar-1.13
(ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/tar/tar-1.13.tar.gz)
I found this:

1999-06-16 Paul Eggert <xxx@xxx>
[snip]
(long_options, usage, OPTION_STRING, decode_options):
Remove -y, --bzip2, --unbzip2.

Which I guess means that new versions of tar don't support the y option anymore. Anybody know why?

they changed it to "j"