Re: [bug-ed] Suggestions

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Dear Issam,

Issam E. Maghni wrote:
> I am not asking about replacing lzip, but simply to add gzip. In
> practice, people tend to use their format of choice (xz, bzip2 or lzip)
> in addition to gzip for tarball distribution. Gzip is universally
> accepted and widely used. You can use pigz and libzopfli to improve
> compression and decompression like I do. You can also print a message in
> the website for people to choose lzip over gzip if possible. I'm
> currently trying to bootstrap a Linux distro, and I don't want to add a
> dependency (lzip) just to extract GNU ed. I will soon ask findutils and
> diffutils maintainers to add gzip to their next releases since they are
> the last two packages in my bootstrapping process of unix tools that does
> not offer gzip (beyond GNU ed).

I'm having difficulties to understand why you are trying to draw several GNU 
packages towards the past. Gzip is obsolete. In its time it was a big 
advance, but nowadays the limitations of both the deflate algorithm and the 
gzip format are evident. The fact that it is widely used is no more relevant 
that the fact that horse-drawn carriages were widely used in 1900. They were 
being replaced by more convenient means of transport, much like gzip is 
being replaced by formats capable of higher compression ratios and better 
adapted to large files and multiprocessor machines. If a GNU package has 
stopped distributing gzipped tarballs, I see no reason to ask its maintainer 
to distribute them again unless that specific package should keep backward 
compatibility with some existing use.

About using pigz, gzip files can't be decompressed in parallel[1]. 
Compressed tar archives created with tar+compressor can't be decoded in 
parallel[2]. I would not use those formats except for backward 
compatibility. I abandoned bzip2 for source tarballs years ago. The only 
packages for which I distribute gzipped tarballs are the lzip 
(de)compressors, and just to ease their first installation in machines 
lacking lzip support. If you want to bootstrap a GNU/Linux distro so tiny 
that it lacks lzip support, I think it is your responsibility to provide the 
legacy tar.gz tarballs (or any other format you wish) required by your project.

[1] http://zlib.net/pigz/
"exploits multiple processors and multiple cores to the hilt when 
compressing data".

[2] 
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/tarlz_manual.html#Multi_002dthreaded-decoding

Best regards,
Antonio.