Re: Mysterious gzipped images

[Romain Francoise]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:

> gzip is "free", since it's already built into 99% of Emacs builds
> already.

This argument applies just as well to other compression types, e.g. in
Debian all variants of Emacs 24 are built with libxml support, and
libxml is linked with liblzma so xz would also be "free".

> I think we can rely on external programs for compression.  It's not
> something that Emacs needs to do efficiently.

Relying on external programs doesn't necessarily work on all platforms.
If we can have a built-in version of anything, we should prefer that to
using external programs.