From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact
Message-ID: <20010820170848.P17724@cackle.proxima.alt.za>
References: <20010820131512.D0B0F19A7D@mail.cse.psu.edu>
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In-Reply-To: <20010820131512.D0B0F19A7D@mail.cse.psu.edu>; from Russ Cox on Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 09:15:10AM -0400
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 17:08:49 +0200
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On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 09:15:10AM -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> 
> The Plan 9 gzip is not the NetBSD gzip.
> Sean Dorward wrote libflate and the
> Plan 9 gzip from scratch, and it only
> handles gzip deflate files, hence the name.
> I'm tired of compression programs that
> know every other compression format.
> They just confuse things.

Crossed wires.  The person who mentioned that Plan 9 gzip only
handles "flating" made it sound to me like that applied to all
known gzip flavours, hence my response.

As for known formats, it seems illogical to stop the unwinding of
compressed data on a philosophical ticket, specially as it often
is a trivial task to do the right thing.  Libflate and libz are
evidently very different, in this case.

BSD tar's "z" option uses libz or zcat, not sure which, so the
suggestion to add Bzip2 capabilities to it on uncompressing went
totally unchallenged.

Personal preferences in the actual compression formats may well be
an entirely different matter.

++L