Messages in this thread | | | From | Alistair John Strachan <> | Subject | Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression | Date | Mon, 22 May 2006 20:15:01 +0100 |
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On Monday 22 May 2006 20:10, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Alistair John Strachan wrote: > > On Monday 22 May 2006 19:58, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > [snip] > > > >> Personally, I would like to suggest adding LZMA capability to gzip. > >> The gzip format already has support for multiple compression formats. > > > > Any idea why this wasn't done for bzip2? > > Yes, the bzip2 author I have been told was originally planning to do that, > but then thought it would be harder to deploy that way (because gzip is a > core utility, and people are nervous about making it larger.) > > You'd have to ask him for the details, though. > > It *is* true that there is a fair bit of code out there which sees a gzip > magic number and expects to call deflate functions on it, without ever > checking the compression type field. However, even if there is a need for a > new magic number, this can be done within the gzip code, or by forking > gzip.
One trivial solution (that comes to mind) is by symlinking gunzip->unlzma (or similar) and having gzip's defaults change according to argv[0].
It's a bit of a shame bzip2 even exists, really. It really would be better if there was one unified, pluggable archiver on UNIX (and portables).
-- Cheers, Alistair.
Third year Computer Science undergraduate. 1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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