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Diffstat (limited to 'TODO')
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@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +TODO file for gzip. + +Some of the planned features include: + +- Remove some of the old porting cruft. since we no longer support + FIXME-2011: in mid to late 2011, remove the following directories: + amiga, atari, msdos, nt, os2, vms + +- Separate out the shell scripts like gzexe into a new little package; + these scripts are less used and less reliable and should be optional. + +- Internationalize by using gettext and setlocale. + +- Structure the sources so that the compression and decompression code + form a library usable by any program, and write both gzip and zip on + top of this library. This would ideally be a reentrant (thread safe) + library, but this would degrade performance. In the meantime, you can + look at the sample program zread.c. + + The library should have one mode in which compressed data is sent + as soon as input is available, instead of waiting for complete + blocks. This can be useful for sending compressed data to/from interactive + programs. + +- Make it convenient to define alternative user interfaces (in + particular for windowing environments). + +- Support in-memory compression for arbitrarily large amounts of data + (zip currently supports in-memory compression only for a single buffer.) + +- Map files in memory when possible, this is generally much faster + than read/write. (zip currently maps entire files at once, this + 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*. + +- 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). + + Note: I will introduce new compression methods only if they are + significantly better in either speed or compression ratio than the + existing method(s). So the total number of different methods should + reasonably not exceed 3. (The current 9 compression levels are just + tuning parameters for a single method, deflation.) + +- Add optional error correction. One problem is that the current version + of ecc cannot recover from inserted or missing bytes. It would be + nice to recover from the most common error (transfer of a binary + file in ascii mode). + +- Add a block size (-b) option to improve error recovery in case of + failure of a complete sector. Each block could be extracted + independently, but this reduces the compression ratio. + + For one possible approach to this, please see: + + http://www.samba.org/netfilter/diary/gzip.rsync.patch + +- Use a larger window size to deal with some large redundant files that + 'compress' currently handles better than gzip. + +- Implement the -e (encrypt) option. + +Send comments to <bug-gzip@gnu.org>. + + +======================================================================== + +Copyright (C) 1999, 2001, 2006, 2009-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc. +Copyright (C) 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly + +Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document +under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or +any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no +Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover +Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free +Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution. |