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Unified Diff: xz/doc/history.txt

Issue 2869016: Add an unpatched version of xz, XZ Utils, to /trunk/deps/third_party (Closed) Base URL: svn://svn.chromium.org/chrome/trunk/deps/third_party/
Patch Set: Created 10 years, 6 months ago
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Index: xz/doc/history.txt
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+
+History of LZMA Utils and XZ Utils
+==================================
+
+Tukaani distribution
+
+ In 2005, there was a small group working on Tukaani distribution, which
+ was a Slackware fork. One of the project goals was to fit the distro on
+ a single 700 MiB ISO-9660 image. Using LZMA instead of gzip helped a
+ lot. Roughly speaking, one could fit data that took 1000 MiB in gzipped
+ form into 700 MiB with LZMA. Naturally compression ratio varied across
+ packages, but this was what we got on average.
+
+ Slackware packages have traditionally had .tgz as the filename suffix,
+ which is an abbreviation of .tar.gz. A logical naming for LZMA
+ compressed packages was .tlz, being an abbreviation of .tar.lzma.
+
+ At the end of the year 2007, there was no distribution under the
+ Tukaani project anymore, but development of LZMA Utils was kept going.
+ Still, there were .tlz packages around, because at least Vector Linux
+ (a Slackware based distribution) used LZMA for its packages.
+
+ First versions of the modified pkgtools used the LZMA_Alone tool from
+ Igor Pavlov's LZMA SDK as is. It was fine, because users wouldn't need
+ to interact with LZMA_Alone directly. But people soon wanted to use
+ LZMA for other files too, and the interface of LZMA_Alone wasn't
+ comfortable for those used to gzip and bzip2.
+
+
+First steps of LZMA Utils
+
+ The first version of LZMA Utils (4.22.0) included a shell script called
+ lzmash. It was wrapper that had gzip-like command line interface. It
+ used the LZMA_Alone tool from LZMA SDK to do all the real work. zgrep,
+ zdiff, and related scripts from gzip were adapted work with LZMA and
+ were part of the first LZMA Utils release too.
+
+ LZMA Utils 4.22.0 included also lzmadec, which was a small (less than
+ 10 KiB) decoder-only command line tool. It was written on top of the
+ decoder-only C code found from the LZMA SDK. lzmadec was convenient in
+ situations where LZMA_Alone (a few hundred KiB) would be too big.
+
+ lzmash and lzmadec were written by Lasse Collin.
+
+
+Second generation
+
+ The lzmash script was an ugly and not very secure hack. The last
+ version of LZMA Utils to use lzmash was 4.27.1.
+
+ LZMA Utils 4.32.0beta1 introduced a new lzma command line tool written
+ by Ville Koskinen. It was written in C++, and used the encoder and
+ decoder from C++ LZMA SDK with little modifications. This tool replaced
+ both the lzmash script and the LZMA_Alone command line tool in LZMA
+ Utils.
+
+ Introducing this new tool caused some temporary incompatibilities,
+ because LZMA_Alone executable was simply named lzma like the new
+ command line tool, but they had completely different command line
+ interface. The file format was still the same.
+
+ Lasse wrote liblzmadec, which was a small decoder-only library based
+ on the C code found from LZMA SDK. liblzmadec had API similar to zlib,
+ although there were some significant differences, which made it
+ non-trivial to use it in some applications designed for zlib and
+ libbzip2.
+
+ The lzmadec command line tool was converted to use liblzmadec.
+
+ Alexandre Sauvé helped converting build system to use GNU Autotools.
+ This made is easier to test for certain less portable features needed
+ by the new command line tool.
+
+ Since the new command line tool never got completely finished (for
+ example, it didn't support LZMA_OPT environment variable), the intent
+ was to not call 4.32.x stable. Similarly, liblzmadec wasn't polished,
+ but appeared to work well enough, so some people started using it too.
+
+ Because the development of the third generation of LZMA Utils was
+ delayed considerably (3-4 years), the 4.32.x branch had to be kept
+ maintained. It got some bug fixes now and then, and finally it was
+ decided to call it stable, although most of the missing features were
+ never added.
+
+
+File format problems
+
+ The file format used by LZMA_Alone was primitive. It was designed for
+ embedded systems in mind, and thus provided only minimal set of
+ features. The two biggest problems for non-embedded use were lack of
+ magic bytes and integrity check.
+
+ Igor and Lasse started developing a new file format with some help
+ from Ville Koskinen. Also Mark Adler, Mikko Pouru, H. Peter Anvin,
+ and Lars Wirzenius helped with some minor things at some point of the
+ development. Designing the new format took quite a long time (actually,
+ too long time would be more appropriate expression). It was mostly
+ because Lasse was quite slow at getting things done due to personal
+ reasons.
+
+ Originally the new format was supposed to use the same .lzma suffix
+ that was already used by the old file format. Switching to the new
+ format wouldn't have caused much trouble when the old format wasn't
+ used by many people. But since the development of the new format took
+ so long time, the old format got quite popular, and it was decided
+ that the new file format must use a different suffix.
+
+ It was decided to use .xz as the suffix of the new file format. The
+ first stable .xz file format specification was finally released in
+ December 2008. In addition to fixing the most obvious problems of
+ the old .lzma format, the .xz format added some new features like
+ support for multiple filters (compression algorithms), filter chaining
+ (like piping on the command line), and limited random-access reading.
+
+ Currently the primary compression algorithm used in .xz is LZMA2.
+ It is an extension on top of the original LZMA to fix some practical
+ problems: LZMA2 adds support for flushing the encoder, uncompressed
+ chunks, eases stateful decoder implementations, and improves support
+ for multithreading. Since LZMA2 is better than the original LZMA, the
+ original LZMA is not supported in .xz.
+
+
+Transition to XZ Utils
+
+ The early versions of XZ Utils were called LZMA Utils. The first
+ releases were 4.42.0alphas. They dropped the rest of the C++ LZMA SDK.
+ The code was still directly based on LZMA SDK but ported to C and
+ converted from callback API to stateful API. Later, Igor Pavlov made
+ C version of the LZMA encoder too; these ports from C++ to C were
+ independent in LZMA SDK and LZMA Utils.
+
+ The core of the new LZMA Utils was liblzma, a compression library with
+ zlib-like API. liblzma supported both the old and new file format. The
+ gzip-like lzma command line tool was rewritten to use liblzma.
+
+ The new LZMA Utils code base was renamed to XZ Utils when the name
+ of the new file format had been decided. The liblzma compression
+ library retained its name though, because changing it would have
+ caused unnecessary breakage in applications already using the early
+ liblzma snapshots.
+
+ The xz command line tool can emulate the gzip-like lzma tool by
+ creating appropriate symlinks (e.g. lzma -> xz). Thus, practically
+ all scripts using the lzma tool from LZMA Utils will work as is with
+ XZ Utils (and will keep using the old .lzma format). Still, the .lzma
+ format is more or less deprecated. XZ Utils will keep supporting it,
+ but new applications should use the .xz format, and migrating old
+ applications to .xz is often a good idea too.
+
Property changes on: xz/doc/history.txt
___________________________________________________________________
Added: svn:eol-style
+ LF
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