Re: lzip support

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Friday 2008-11-28 17:21, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

> Since LZIP support has appeared apparently out of the blue (no
> prior discussion on this list), and Automake already had LZMA
> support, can someone please explain LZIP vs LZMA and why we now
> have at least two LZMA compressed targets?

See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lzip-bug/2008-11/msg00003.html ,
I think this should answer it.

> I see that LZIP is GPL licensed and is pretty small, and with just
> one author.

Sometimes, simplicity is the key. And I do not think that having
exactly 1.0 authors makes a project insignificant.

> It also seems that LZIP is not capable of decoding LZMA
> utils output.

In the gzip × bzip2 × lzma matrix, neither can decode another.
So it's not like lzip would be missing a feature others would have.

> If automake now supports 'lzip', why does it not also offer to support 7-Zip',
> 'srpm', 'zoo', 'arc', and the many other possible archiving formats so that
> confusion of the user base can become complete?

I would say because 7zip, ZOO and ARC (what's with these 1990s packers?)
do not support UNIX owners nor permissions (required for the beloved +x bit
on scripts.).