| Index: xz/doc/history.txt
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| ===================================================================
|
| --- xz/doc/history.txt (revision 0)
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| +++ xz/doc/history.txt (revision 0)
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| @@ -0,0 +1,149 @@
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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
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| + 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.
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| +
|
| + Slackware packages have traditionally had .tgz as the filename suffix,
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| + which is an abbreviation of .tar.gz. A logical naming for LZMA
|
| + compressed packages was .tlz, being an abbreviation of .tar.lzma.
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| +
|
| + 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
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| + LZMA for other files too, and the interface of LZMA_Alone wasn't
|
| + comfortable for those used to gzip and bzip2.
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| +
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| +
|
| +First steps of LZMA Utils
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| +
|
| + 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
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| + 10 KiB) decoder-only command line tool. It was written on top of the
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| + decoder-only C code found from the LZMA SDK. lzmadec was convenient in
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| + situations where LZMA_Alone (a few hundred KiB) would be too big.
|
| +
|
| + lzmash and lzmadec were written by Lasse Collin.
|
| +
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| +
|
| +Second generation
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| +
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| + The lzmash script was an ugly and not very secure hack. The last
|
| + version of LZMA Utils to use lzmash was 4.27.1.
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| +
|
| + 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
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| + decoder from C++ LZMA SDK with little modifications. This tool replaced
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| + both the lzmash script and the LZMA_Alone command line tool in LZMA
|
| + Utils.
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| +
|
| + 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.
|
| +
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| +
|
| +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
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| + 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.
|
| +
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|
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| Property changes on: xz/doc/history.txt
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| ___________________________________________________________________
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| Added: svn:eol-style
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| + LF
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