Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> writes: > On 8/16/25 19:01, Collin Funk wrote: >> Is there any reason that gzip doesn't use quote and error from Gnulib? >> e.g. to avoid dependencies on locale stuff? > > Partly that, and partly because it's a symptom of a larger issue: gzip > was written in a hurry and is poorly structured and people > understandably don't want to mess with it. Decades ago I toyed with > the idea of rewriting it from scratch but gave it up as a job not > worth doing.
Yep, I wanted to get rid of some of the ancient cruft (e.g. pre-standard C tolower [1]), but it is a chore. One has to be careful with patches that are less trivial than that one. It probably makes sense to rewrite 'gzip' using zlib which is more portable than Gnulib (IIRC) and very stable. If one wants experimental optimizations they could link to zlib-ng instead. But also, pigz exists using zlib, so maybe there isn't much benefit... Collin [1] https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=74196
