Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

[Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk>]

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.