Re: Patch for transparent decompression

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

Reuben Thomas wrote:
> My patch to add transparent decompression, as per the TODO list, at:
>
> https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?6107
>
> builds correctly against current CVS. Could someone review it? (Tony, 
> you encouraged me to work on my patches six weeks ago, and then I think 
> we were side-tracked by discussion of the build system). I'm keen to get 
> this patch and a similar one to allow dynamic loading of PCRE into grep.
>
> Note that the above patch is for code only; I'll write a documentation 
> patch as soon as it's accepted. See the tracker for details, but 
> basically this patch adds an --uncompress switch which uses libz to do 
> transparent decompression.

Thanks Reuben for the patch. I took a quick look and I have a few comments:

* The patch statically links with libz at compile time. If grep is 
installed before libz, then it would need to be recompiled. Ideally, the 
user should have an option of forcing static linking, use dynamic 
linking, or totally disabling the option. How complicated is it to get 
that working?

I remember there was a patch that tried to do this for -P, but I 
couldn't locate it. Need to dig deeper.

* In addition to documentation, I'd like to see some test cases. And the 
more the better :O)

* My understanding is that zlib support .gz files. Any plans to 
integrate libbzip2 as well?

And a question to the community: is --uncompress a good option name? Any 
objections? Zlib uses the term 'decompress'.

Cheers,

TAA

--
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Email:    address@hidden
Web site: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net