On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Eric Lee Green wrote:
> Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> > The problem with .zip is that it was Not Invented Here (NIH).
> Err, no. The problem with .zip is that it was invented over five years
> after .tar.Z became standard on Unix.

Well that maybe one problem. But there's still a significant advantage at
using .zip, or any other similar format.

> Richard Stallman threw a fit and decided to re-write 'compress' in a
> non-patent-infringing manner.

Well, I don't know how much he was involved with it, but he didn't
"write" any code. JL Gailly did.

> This was somewhere around 1991, if I recall correctly. Note that pkzip
> arguably violates the Unisys patent since it uses basically the same
> compression algorithm as 'arc', which is basically the same
> compression algorithm as 'compress',

well, there is pkzip 1 ('89) and pkzip 2 ('93). Pkzip 1 did compress
significantly better than arc; Pkzip 2 is significantly better than Pkzip
1, and extremely similar to GZip in performance (normally +/- 1%); which
are you talking about?

> Lately a better compression routine (bzip2) has been invented that
> compresses better than 'gzip' (which in turn compressed better than
> 'compress' and its derivatives such as 'arc' and 'pkzip'),

A lot of compression algorithms are regularly invented that beat gzip and
even beat bzip2; the latter only got more attention because it was
implemented with a gzip-like interface.

> and many Unix programs are now packaged as both .tar.gz and .tar.bz2
> files, just as, during the transition from .Z to .gz in the early
> 90's, many Unix programs were packaged as both .Z and .gz files.

I don't see bz2 replacing gzip, because bz2 compression is not streamable.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                   http://hostname.2y.net/~matju