Re: [Bug-tar] [PATCH] Do not fail when 'compress' is unable to provide sufficient compress ratio

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> > Converting gzip to the general API seems the right thing to do in the long term.
>
> That might be wise, yes, but there might be other users who
> expect the current behavior, and we'd need to consult with them.

To my surprise I have found that the current behavior is that gzip does 
not return '2' even if the compressed file is larger than the original:

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=testfile bs=1K count=1
$ ls -go testfile*
-rw-r--r--  1 1024 2013-04-28 19:04 testfile
$ gzip testfile ; echo $?
0
$ ls -go testfile*
-rw-r--r--  1 1056 2013-04-28 19:04 testfile.gz


> And there are a lot of other compressor programs to update.
> In the meantime 'tar' should work with what's out there.

If it is not broken, don't fix it. I think nobody has reported a problem 
caused by any compressor other than compress returning 2. Most probably 
it is the documentation of those other compressors (including gzip) what 
is wrong, not the code.


Best regards,
Antonio.