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.
