3 Some of the planned features include:
5 - Remove some of the old porting cruft, since we no longer support it.
7 - Separate out the shell scripts like gzexe into a new little package;
8 these scripts are less used and less reliable and should be optional.
10 - Internationalize by using gettext and setlocale.
12 - Structure the sources so that the compression and decompression code
13 form a library usable by any program, and write both gzip and zip on
14 top of this library. This would ideally be a reentrant (thread safe)
15 library, but this would degrade performance. In the meantime, you can
16 look at the sample program zread.c.
18 The library should have one mode in which compressed data is sent
19 as soon as input is available, instead of waiting for complete
20 blocks. This can be useful for sending compressed data to/from interactive
23 - Make it convenient to define alternative user interfaces (in
24 particular for windowing environments).
26 - Support in-memory compression for arbitrarily large amounts of data
27 (zip currently supports in-memory compression only for a single buffer.)
29 - Map files in memory when possible, this is generally much faster
30 than read/write. (zip currently maps entire files at once, this
31 should be done in chunks to reduce memory usage.)
33 - Add a super-fast compression method, suitable for implementing
34 file systems with transparent compression. One problem is that the
35 best candidate (lzrw1) is patented twice (Waterworth 4,701,745
36 and Gibson & Graybill 5,049,881). The lzrw series of algorithms
37 are available by ftp in ftp.adelaide.edu.au:/pub/compression/lzrw*.
39 - Add a super-tight (but slow) compression method, suitable for long
40 term archives. One problem is that the best versions of arithmetic
41 coding are patented (4,286,256 4,295,125 4,463,342 4,467,317
42 4,633,490 4,652,856 4,891,643 4,905,297 4,935,882 4,973,961
45 Note: I will introduce new compression methods only if they are
46 significantly better in either speed or compression ratio than the
47 existing method(s). So the total number of different methods should
48 reasonably not exceed 3. (The current 9 compression levels are just
49 tuning parameters for a single method, deflation.)
51 - Add optional error correction. One problem is that the current version
52 of ecc cannot recover from inserted or missing bytes. It would be
53 nice to recover from the most common error (transfer of a binary
56 - Add a block size (-b) option to improve error recovery in case of
57 failure of a complete sector. Each block could be extracted
58 independently, but this reduces the compression ratio.
60 For one possible approach to this, please see:
62 http://www.samba.org/netfilter/diary/gzip.rsync.patch
64 - Use a larger window size to deal with some large redundant files that
65 'compress' currently handles better than gzip.
67 - Implement the -e (encrypt) option.
69 Send comments to <bug-gzip@gnu.org>.
72 ========================================================================
74 Copyright (C) 1999, 2001, 2006, 2009-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
75 Copyright (C) 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly
77 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
78 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
79 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
80 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
81 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
82 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.