Re: Zutils vs single compressor utilities

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

On 12/14/2010 11:27 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> That sounds too drastic.  I am not a fan of gzip's scripts,
> but I've learned from years of maintenance that a lot of
> people use them and depend on their every idiosyncrasy.
> I suspect it's better to approach any such replacement conservatively,
> where the default is to do things as they were done before.

You may be right. Let us be cautious until we see what problems arise.


Eric Blake wrote:
> As long as it is a configure-time option, with the default being the way
> it was before, but the ability to change it is easy, then distros will
> use the option to make the change.  The burden of remembering to use the
> option is then limited to the few people who build both gzip and zutils
> themselves from upstream rather than relying on a distro; those people
> tend to be the ones technically savvy enough to realize the
> ramifications of building from scratch, and should be capable of
> realizing when to use the new configure option.

This certainly limits the number of users directly affected, but in the 
long term I hope the following naming scheme will prevail because it is 
more logical and thus produces less surprises:
 zcat --> multi-format
gzcat --> gzip-only
bzcat --> bzip2-only
...


Best regards,
Antonio.