Hey folks, >From what I can tell perusing the source code of various versions, GNU gzip has never actually supported the documented purpose of flagbit 1, "FHCRC". http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1952.txt says "[The FHCRC bit was never set by versions of gzip up to 1.2.4, even though it was documented with a different meaning in gzip 1.2.4.]" However, it appears that that same "different" (and arguably pointless) meaning--i.e., "multi-part continuation"--continues to be honored by all subsequent versions, including 1.4.0.
Are there any plans to address this? Sun's JDK supports the header-CRC interpretation, as does my own decompressor implementation in Hadoop. The whole concept of "multi-part" archives (as opposed to multi-member/concat- enated files) was a stupid carryover from the PKZIP/floppy-disk days, so I find it hard to believe it will ever be either desired or supported in gzip, particularly since the 2GB limit was eliminated nearly a decade ago. It would be great if 1.5 supported the header CRC as specified. (This isn't really a backward-compatibility issue, either, insofar as no version of gzip has ever done anything but bail when that bit is set. Doing the Right Thing with it would be, you know...novel. ;-) ) Oh, also please update the README as follows: --- README.old 2010-01-03 09:26:02.000000000 -0800 +++ README 2010-06-23 15:20:18.000000000 -0700 @@ -119,9 +119,9 @@ gzip and gunzip are distributed as a single program. zip and unzip are, for historical reasons, two separate programs, although the -authors of these two programs work closely together in the info-zip +authors of these two programs work closely together in the Info-ZIP team. zip and unzip are not associated with the GNU project. -See http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/ for more about zip and unzip. +See http://www.info-zip.org/ for more about zip and unzip. ======================================================================== Thanks, -- Greg Roelofs n...@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~newt/ Newtware, PNG Group, AlphaWorld Map, Yahoo! Grid/Hadoop, ...
