Re: [Lzip-bug] Regarding Verbose Output for Decompression in Lzip

[Timothy Beryl Grahek]

Hi Antonio,

There might be two copies of this email; hopefully the first one can
be deleted. I accidentally sent the first one in HTML instead of plain
text. :(

> On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 8:21 AM, Antonio Diaz Diaz <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thanks. This has been recently requested[1]. I plan to start working on it in 
> a few days, and then implement it as soon as I can work out some details[2]. 
> Suggestions are welcome. :-)
>
> [1] http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lzip-bug/2017-07/msg00005.html
> [2] http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lzip-bug/2017-07/msg00011.html


I apologize for not noticing ahead of time that this feature was
requested already. But at least I was able to give you some input. :)

Regarding the second mailing list you referred to, I think including a
progress meter in the verbose option in decompression ultimately
depends if you can get the same behavior on both compression and
decompression. In other words, when I specify 'vv' when compressing, I
see progress; when I specify 'vv' when decompressing, I would like to
see similar progress up till right before the end. I definitely think
the final output for Lzip is superior to XZ in its current form, so if
Lzip could keep that same final output while having an implementation
for progress, that would be highly desirable.

To be as clear as possible, something like this would be good for
decompression, in my humble opinion:

lzip -vvd TImages2.tar.lz
TImages2.tar.lz:   75%  239.1 MB
then
TImages2.tar.lz:  2.740:1,  2.919 bits/byte, 63.51% saved, 114831363
in, 314664960 out.


So it's the same as compression, if it were to look like this. The
size after the percentage in this example is referring to the
uncompressed size, but it probably makes more sense for it to refer to
the compressed size when decompressing. But it's up to you what makes
more sense, really. ;)

> I find the output of lzip much nicer (and similar to gzip/bzip2) than that 
> >of xz, specially when decompressing multiple files. In particular I like 
> that >lzip prints one line per file, and shows an "ok" at the end


I notice that the word 'ok' does not appear at the end if you are
either compressing or decompressing an archive, but it does appear
when testing an archive. Anyhow, I definitely prefer the output and
interface of Lzip compared to XZ. :)

Lastly, a '-g' option seems like a good choice if '-vv' won't work. If
you do go with that, what makes the most sense to me is if you remove
the progress indicator in compression when specifying '-vv' and then
opting for progress for both operations when specifying the '-g'
option. I can check this for you, if you would like me to, but I
believe Bzip2 does not show progress with either compression or
decompression when specifying '-vv', so that is certainly noteworthy
when considering using a '-g' option. In that case, it may very well
be more desirable to use '-g' instead of '-vv' to indicate progress.

Best regards,

Timothy Beryl Grahek