From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) Subject: Re: ANSWER: (Re: GCC report segmentation fault and dump core.) Date: 14 Oct 1992 07:40:08 GMT
davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) brings up the question of using a
better compression program than compress(1), suggesting info-zip zip and
unzip as good replacements.
This has come up once or twice already, and I think that the main points
have been more or less like this:
For:
- better compression
- built in crc checking
Against:
- uncompress is everywhere in Unix-land, zip and unzip are not
- most compression programs have a bad understanding of Unix
filesystem peculiarities (permissions, links, etc)
The potential availability of zip and unzip should be rather big, since
they are (claimed to be) pretty portable, so it should be fairly easy to
install them. Of course, there are places where it is impossible to
install new software (even for personal use), but those places are
presumably in a small minority. So the first reason against more or
less vanishes.
The second one is more difficult, but can be solved by zipping tar
files. In fact, this is a good idea anyways: compressing one large file
is more effective than lots of smaller ones. I have found that zipping
a lot of individual files often results in larger archives than a
corresponding .tar.Z file.
However, doing .tar.zip looses in convenience: you can't do the
equivalent of "tar -tzf foo.tar.Z". Unless, of course, somebody hacks
GNU tar to understand .tar.zip files (shouldn't be too difficult since
unzip can uncompress to stdout; the major difficulty is in picking a
good option letter...).
Personally, I wouldn't object to using .tar.zip instead of .tar.Z, even
without the GNU tar hack. I do object to .zip of a lot of individual
files. Actually, what I would like most of all, is zip and unzip with
the user interface of compress and uncompress.
BTW, before we change compression programs, we should do a survey of the
available options, so that we can choose the best one, and be convinced
that there is enough reason to change. I know of at least Zoo, LHa,
yabba, and freeze as possible options. However, all of these suffer
from the fact that they are not supported, or at least not supported to
the degree that zip and unzip are. Most (all?) of them are one man
projects, while zip and unzip are a product of a larger number of people
(the INFO-ZIP mailing list).