Re: Run-time dynamic linking in grep

[Reuben Thomas]

On 21 January 2011 14:42, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thanks, but you must have left out some important pieces.

I apologise, I did indeed miss out some important pieces, and I'm
working on it already.

> However, I am left wondering how useful this option would
> be when it applies only to gzip'd data.
> What about bzip2 and xz?

When I last discussed this on the list, the suggestion was to get it
working for zlib first, and then extend it to other libraries, simply
checking magic to decide which decompressor to use. zutils, though
written in C++, can be used as a reference.

> While gzip is still ubiquitous, it is obviously inferior to xz.

Quite so. What's really needed is a library-level integration, so that
applications can use just one set of APIs to use all of the various
available (de)compression libraries clamouring for our attention. That
would also reduce the amount of work needed in grep, tar &c.

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