Message-ID: <44720CB6.7010908@zytor.com>
Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 12:10:46 -0700
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
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To: Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk>
CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression
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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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