Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750940AbWEVVAI (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 May 2006 17:00:08 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751179AbWEVVAI (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 May 2006 17:00:08 -0400 Received: from smtp.bulldogdsl.com ([212.158.248.7]:58384 "EHLO mcr-smtp-001.bulldogdsl.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750940AbWEVVAH (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 May 2006 17:00:07 -0400 X-Spam-Abuse: Please report all spam/abuse matters to abuse@bulldogdsl.com From: Alistair John Strachan To: Jan Engelhardt Subject: Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 22:00:18 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.1 Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <200605222015.01980.s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200605222200.18351.s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1492 Lines: 37 On Monday 22 May 2006 21:24, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > >> > 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.) > > I'd say that concern is valid. > > >It's a bit of a shame bzip2 even exists, really. It really would be better > > if there was one unified, pluggable archiver on UNIX (and portables). > > Would You Like To Contribute(tm)? :) > Whenever a program is missing, someone is there to write it. I would, but if it's a "valid concern" that gzip is a few hundred KB larger, and the community would not graciously receive such work, there's not much point, is there? :-) Seriously, though, if I understand gzip correctly, it uses deflate/zlib internally. Why, in that case, does /bin/gzip not (dynamically) link against libz? If a first step was fixing that, a second could be linking dynamically against libbz2 and 'liblzma', and making it all compile-time configurable. That should keep everybody happy. -- Cheers, Alistair. Third year Computer Science undergraduate. 1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/