Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

[H. Peter Anvin]

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
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