[Lzip-bug] about lzip..

[Jan Engelhardt]

Hi,


Seeing the ddrescue release announcement of Freshmeat, I noticed that 
the tarball was offered in .lz format too. I suspected that this may be 
something called lzip, and did a google search, which revealed that Lzip 
was actually an April Fools Joke 2001 project:

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/31/0516216.shtml

Now it seems that another Lzip (yours) showed up in 2008 according to 
the freshmeat page at http://freshmeat.net/p/lzip . This name confusion 
is bad ...

What can lzip do better than lzma from http://tukaani.org/lzma/ (which 
is already used widely (e.g. present in distributions and, for example2, 
lzma'ed payload for RPM packages))?

A comparison even shows that lzip seems to be just around lzma:
[standard compression]
-rw-r--r--  1 jengelh users 1822720 Nov 18 21:37 pam_mount-1.3.tar
-rw-r--r--  1 jengelh users  254391 Nov 18 21:41 pam_mount-1.3.tar.lz
-rw-r--r--  1 jengelh users  253371 Nov 18 21:37 pam_mount-1.3.tar.lzma

$ time lzma <pam_mount-1.3.tar >pam_mount-1.3.tar.lzma
real    0m3.897s
user    0m3.667s

$ time lzip <pam_mount-1.3.tar >pam_mount-1.3.tar.lz
real    0m3.420s
user    0m3.246s


In -9 compression, lzma even wins on my particular sample:

-rw-r--r-- 1 jengelh users 253261 Nov 18 21:43 pam_mount-1.3.tar.lz
-rw-r--r-- 1 jengelh users 253134 Nov 18 21:44 pam_mount-1.3.tar.lzma

$ time lzip -9 <pam_mount-1.3.tar >pam_mount-1.3.tar.lz
real    0m6.109s
user    0m5.840s

$ time lzma -9 <pam_mount-1.3.tar >pam_mount-1.3.tar.lzma
real    0m5.234s
user    0m5.003s