Zutils vs single compressor utilities

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello,

As nobody responded to 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2009-08/msg00000.html, I am 
sending this message again.

Vincent Lefevre (maintainer of the MPFR package) suggested that 
utilities like zdiff, bzdiff, lzdiff, etc, should be provided 
independently of compressors. So I have written a package named zutils 
where I include such utilities with support for gzip, bzip2, lzip, xz 
and uncompressed files. (Support for other compressors may be added later).

I am writing you because the most obvious names for such utilities are 
the names of the utilities already distributed with gzip. I hope we can 
cooperate to avoid name clashes in distributions. I think the best way 
is gzip, bzip2 and lzip stop distributing their respective utilities and 
distributions provide the zutils port/package to replace those utilities.

Alternatively, gzip utilities could be renamed to gzcat, gzdiff, etc.

The zutils package has been offered to GNU and is waiting approval, but 
it seems coordination with the gzip maintainer is the main pending issue.

With zutils you can do:
zdiff file1.lz file2.gz
zdiff file1.bz2 file2
  or
zgrep "string" file1 file2.lz file3.gz file4.bz2

Zutils homepage is http://www.nongnu.org/zutils/zutils.html


Best regards,
Antonio.