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TODO
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TODO file for gzip. Some of the planned features include: - 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. - 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. 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. 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 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: 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. - Implement the -e (encrypt) option. Send comments to <bug-gzip@gnu.org>. ======================================================================== 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 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.
