[Lzip-bug] Plzip 1.9-rc1 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Plzip 1.9-rc1 is ready for testing here
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/plzip/plzip-1.9-rc1.tar.lz
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/plzip/plzip-1.9-rc1.tar.gz

The sha256sums are:
e4183a2f5baca0ec7adaef2192f1dc424f07028fea5d50e0a971ac0310e033c0 
plzip-1.9-rc1.tar.lz
a173b96744f97e4b3122ef2d6f918cf0a402505facffcb8c684492117f1c63cd 
plzip-1.9-rc1.tar.gz

Please, test it and report any bugs you find.

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

Lzip is a lossless data compressor with a user interface similar to the one 
of gzip or bzip2. Lzip uses a simplified form of the 'Lempel-Ziv-Markov 
chain-Algorithm' (LZMA) stream format, chosen to maximize safety and 
interoperability. 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 lzip file format is designed for data sharing and long-term archiving, 
taking into account both data integrity and decoder availability.

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

Changes in this version:

  * Plzip now reports an error if a file name is empty (plzip -t "").

  * Option '-o, --output' now behaves like '-c, --stdout', but sending the 
output unconditionally to a file instead of to standard output. See the new 
description of '-o' in the manual. This change is backwards compatible only 
when (de)compressing from standard input alone. Therefore commands like:
  plzip -o foo.lz - bar < foo
must now be split into:
  plzip -o foo.lz - < foo
  plzip bar
or rewritten as:
  plzip - bar < foo > foo.lz

  * When using '-c' or '-o', plzip now checks whether the output is a 
terminal only once.

  * The words 'decompressed' and 'compressed' have been replaced with the 
shorter 'out' and 'in' in the verbose output when decompressing or testing.

  * When checking the integrity of multiple files, plzip is now able to 
continue checking the rest of the files (instead of exiting) if some of them 
fail the test, allowing 'plzip --test' to show a final diagnostic with the 
number of files that failed (just as 'lzip --test').

  * When compressing, or when decompressing or testing from a non-seekable 
file or from standard input, plzip now starts only the number of worker 
threads required.

  * When decompressing or testing from a non-seekable file or from standard 
input, trailing data are now not counted in the compressed size shown.

  * When decompressing or testing a multimember file, plzip now shows the 
largest dictionary size of all members in the file instead of showing the 
dictionary size of the first member.

  * Option '--list' now reports corruption or truncation of the last header 
in a multimenber file specifically instead of showing the generic message 
"Last member in input file is truncated or corrupt."

  * The error messages for 'Data error' and 'Unexpected EOF' have been 
shortened.

  * The commands needed to extract files from a tar.lz archive have been 
documented in the manual, in the output of '--help', and in the man page.

  * Several fixes and improvements have been made to the manual.

  * 8 new test files have been added to the testsuite.


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, plzip co-author and maintainer.
Self-determination is a human right. Free Catalan political prisoners.
--
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.