Re: GNU grep 2.5.4 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Jim,

Jim Meyering wrote:
> I would like to distribute compression-stream-agnostic scripts like
> those in your zutils package via gzip releases.

Are you sure this is a good idea? Vincent Lefevre (maintainer of the 
MPFR package) suggested that utilities like zdiff, bzdiff, lzdiff, etc, 
should be provided independently of compressors. Some other people, 
including me, think this is the best way of providing such utilities.

Zutils is beta software, and I am doing frequent releases. Are you going 
to release a new version of gzip every time one of the scripts needs a 
change?


> Would you be willing to contribute those to gzip and assign copyright?

Of course you can distribute zutils with gzip if you like, but my 
current plans are exactly the opposite. I wrote to Paul Eggert 
(maintainer of gzip) and to bug-gzip[1] asking him to stop distributing 
those utilities, (or rename gzip utilities to gzcat, gzdiff, etc), so 
that distributions could provide the zutils package to replace the 
gzip-only utilities.
[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2009-08/msg00000.html


Regards,
Antonio.