Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:56:24 -0800 (PST) From: bf <bf2006a@yahoo.com> To: ivoras@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: lzma compression/decompression in bsdtar/libarchive? Message-ID: <917783.1650.qm@web39102.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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> How useful would LZMA be without supporting the .7z file format?
> Probably not at all, since there isn't a gzip-like file format or
> wrapper that supports LZMA.
?? Have you looked at this code? Yes, there is: there is an "LZMA
compressed file format" and the 7z file format, both of which support
LZMA. The former format has been widely adopted by people who distribute
lzma-compressed tarballs, especially GNU-related projects that use the
lzmautils port. Some projects, like GNU coreutils, no longer distribute
the latest versions of their software in bzip2-compressed tarballs.
> Since .7z supports a lot of compression formats and options
> (unfortunatly saving unix ownership and mode attributes isn't one of
> them so be careful there!) it would probably be easier to just import
> p7z - and that's probably out of the question. It's available in the
> ports just fine.
I don't see why the 7z file format couldn't be supported, if that's
considered desirable. But it's certainly not *necessary* to do so in
order to derive some benefit from lzma compression. It seems to me that
importing some form of the smaller lzma sdk would be easier than importing
the whole of p7z, which probably isn't necessary in any case. Both the
lzma sdk and p7z are available in ports, but they haven't been exploited
in ports or the base system. If there is an efficient, integrated lzma
(de)compression engine in libarchive, it is almost certain to be more
widely used, and that would probably benefit a lot of people. It's the
same rationale for having compress, zip, gzip, and bzip2 forms of
compression in the base system, although they are also available from
ports.
Regards,
b.
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