On Mon, 20 May 1996, Yves Arrouye wrote: > Is it impossible to distribute a real compress program? I know there > may be problems with an LZW patent, but I don't know how they relate > to the distribution of a compress program for say personal use. > If this is possible I'll make a package for it.
If we do have a compress package, it must go in non-free. > If this is really impossible, would it be at least possible for the > gzip package *not* to provide a compress link (uncompress is okay > because gzip correctly uncompresses compress'ed files)? It is really > confusing to be able to run the compress command deep in an app. building > hierarchy and to see some time after that (in my case) the fonts file > that have been compressed by this compressed cannot be understood by X > (starting with mkfontdir). The gzip package should not provide a compress link. I asked the maintainer to remove the link some time ago, and he did - it seems to have crept back in though. I will submit a bug report. I need a real 'compress' for font file compression too. I suppose I haven't noticed the bad gzip package because I put a real compress in /usr/local/bin, and it's ahead of /usr/bin on my PATH. Steve Early [EMAIL PROTECTED]
