[Lzip-bug] Plzip 1.8 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

I am pleased to announce the release of plzip 1.8.

Plzip is a massively parallel (multi-threaded) implementation of lzip, 
fully compatible with lzip 1.4 or newer. Plzip uses the lzlib 
compression library.

Lzip is a lossless data compressor with a user interface similar to the 
one of gzip or bzip2. Lzip can compress about as fast as gzip (lzip -0) 
or compress most files more than bzip2 (lzip -9). Decompression speed is 
intermediate between gzip and bzip2. Lzip is better than gzip and bzip2 
from a data recovery perspective. Lzip has been designed, written and 
tested with great care to replace gzip and bzip2 as the standard 
general-purpose compressed format for unix-like systems.

Plzip can compress/decompress large files on multiprocessor machines 
much faster than lzip, at the cost of a slightly reduced compression 
ratio (0.4 to 2 percent larger compressed files). Note that the number 
of usable threads is limited by file size; on files larger than a few GB 
plzip can use hundreds of processors, but on files of only a few MB 
plzip is no faster than lzip.

The homepage is at http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/plzip.html

The sources can be downloaded from 
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/plzip/

The sha256sums are:
a961562584b8c1b7a315e8a96cefddb7790e16e5b5f7338f218d382ecc15d8d9 
plzip-1.8.tar.lz
edafae3c15142ac0ebd84c2231ff81da4f68db58359a737e750f2780686c3612 
plzip-1.8.tar.gz

This release is also GPG signed. You can download the signature by 
appending '.sig' to the URL. If the 'gpg --verify' command fails because 
you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 8FE99503132D7742

Key fingerprint = 1D41 C14B 272A 2219 A739  FA4F 8FE9 9503 132D 7742


Changes in version 1.8:

  * The new options '--in-slots' and '--out-slots', setting the number 
of input and output packets buffered during streamed decompression, have 
been added. Increasing the number of packets may increase decompression 
speed, but requires more memory.

  * The default number of input packets buffered per worker thread when 
decompressing from non-seekable input has been increased from 2 to 4.

  * The default number of output packets buffered per worker thread 
when decompressing to non-seekable output has been increased from 32 to 64.

  * Detection of forbidden combinations of characters in trailing data 
has been improved.

  * Errors are now also checked when closing the input file.

  * The descriptions of '-0..-9', '-m' and '-s' in the manual have been 
improved.

  * The configure script now accepts the option '--with-mingw' to 
enable the compilation of plzip under MS Windows (with the MinGW 
compiler). Use with care. The Windows I/O functions used are not 
guaranteed to be thread safe. (Code based on a patch by Hannes Domani).

  * The configure script now accepts appending options to CXXFLAGS 
using the syntax 'CXXFLAGS+=OPTIONS'.

  * It has been documented in INSTALL the use of
    CXXFLAGS+='-D __USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO' when compiling on MinGW.


Please send bug reports and suggestions to address@hidden


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, plzip co-author and maintainer.

--
If you care about long-term archiving, please help me replace xz with 
lzip. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance and
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html Thanks.