Some of the planned features include:
-- Remove some of the old porting cruft, since we no longer support
- PRIMOS etc. any more.
+- Remove some of the old porting cruft, since we no longer support it.
- Separate out the shell scripts like gzexe into a new little package;
these scripts are less used and less reliable and should be optional.
should be done in chunks to reduce memory usage.)
- Add a super-fast compression method, suitable for implementing
- file systems with transparent compression. One problem is that the
- best candidate (lzrw1) is patented twice (Waterworth 4,701,745
- and Gibson & Graybill 5,049,881). The lzrw series of algorithms
- are available by ftp in ftp.adelaide.edu.au:/pub/compression/lzrw*.
+ file systems with transparent compression. The lzrw series of algorithms
+ are available at http://www.ross.net/compression/.
- Add a super-tight (but slow) compression method, suitable for long
- term archives. One problem is that the best versions of arithmetic
- coding are patented (4,286,256 4,295,125 4,463,342 4,467,317
- 4,633,490 4,652,856 4,891,643 4,905,297 4,935,882 4,973,961
- 5,023,611 5,025,258).
+ term archives. See, for example, US Patents 4,286,256 4,295,125
+ 4,463,342 4,467,317 4,633,490 4,652,856 4,891,643 4,905,297
+ 4,935,882 4,973,961 5,023,611 5,025,258, which have all expired.
+ More recent patent-free techniques may also be available.
Note: I will introduce new compression methods only if they are
significantly better in either speed or compression ratio than the
For one possible approach to this, please see:
- http://www.samba.org/netfilter/diary/gzip.rsync.patch
+ https://ozlabs.org/~rusty/gzip.rsync.patch
- Use a larger window size to deal with some large redundant files that
'compress' currently handles better than gzip.
========================================================================
-Copyright (C) 1999, 2001, 2006, 2009-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+Copyright (C) 1999, 2001, 2006, 2009-2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Copyright (C) 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document