Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

Alistair John Strachan
2006-05-22T19:14:52Z

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.