compress -d => uncompress ?

[Bdale Garbee]

A user of my Debian packaging of tar reports unhappiness that the -Z option
and friends don't work on Debian, even for file extraction.

Because the 'compress' program is encumbered, it is not part of Debian.  The
gunzip command can extract a 'compress' archive, but gzip cannot create one.
We therefore deliver an 'uncompress' symlink to gunzip as part of our gzip
package, but no 'compress' symlink.  There is a non-free package called 
ncompress available for Debian systems that provides 'compress', but clearly
it would be inappropriate for the free tar package to recommend or even suggest
that package since it is not part of Debian.

So, this leads me to wonder if src/tar.c might be updated, either by default
or in the presense of a configure-time option, to call 'uncompress' instead of
'compress -d' when trying to uncompress an archive, or even to call gunzip
directly?  Clearly, it is not appropriate to call gzip on compression since
that won't yield a 'compress' format archive... but it would be nice to fix
the extraction case on Debian.

Thanks.

Bdale