Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

H. Peter Anvin
2006-05-22T19:11:00Z

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.

-hpa