[Lzip-bug] Tarlz 0.24 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

I am pleased to announce the release of tarlz 0.24.

Tarlz is a massively parallel (multi-threaded) combined implementation of 
the tar archiver and the lzip compressor. Tarlz uses the compression library 
lzlib.

Tarlz creates tar archives using a simplified and safer variant of the POSIX 
pax format compressed in lzip format, keeping the alignment between tar 
members and lzip members. The resulting multimember tar.lz archive is fully 
backward compatible with standard tar tools like GNU tar, which treat it 
like any other tar.lz archive. Tarlz can append files to the end of such 
compressed archives.

Keeping the alignment between tar members and lzip members has two 
advantages. It adds an indexed lzip layer on top of the tar archive, making 
it possible to decode the archive safely in parallel. It also minimizes the 
amount of data lost in case of corruption. Compressing a tar archive with 
plzip may even double the amount of files lost for each lzip member damaged 
because it does not keep the members aligned.

Tarlz can create tar archives with five levels of compression granularity: 
per file (--no-solid), per block (--bsolid, default), per directory 
(--dsolid), appendable solid (--asolid), and solid (--solid). It can also 
create uncompressed tar archives.

Of course, compressing each file (or each directory) individually can't 
achieve a compression ratio as high as compressing solidly the whole tar 
archive, but it has the following advantages:

   * The resulting multimember tar.lz archive can be decompressed in
     parallel, multiplying the decompression speed.

   * New members can be appended to the archive (by removing the
     end-of-archive member), and unwanted members can be deleted from the
     archive. Just like an uncompressed tar archive.

   * It is a safe POSIX-style backup format. In case of corruption, tarlz
     can extract all the undamaged members from the tar.lz archive,
     skipping over the damaged members, just like the standard
     (uncompressed) tar. Moreover, the option '--keep-damaged' can be used
     to recover as much data as possible from each damaged member, and
     lziprecover can be used to recover some of the damaged members.

   * A multimember tar.lz archive is usually smaller than the corresponding
     solidly compressed tar.gz archive, except when individually
     compressing files smaller than about 32 KiB.

Note that the POSIX pax format has a serious flaw. The metadata stored in 
pax extended records are not protected by any kind of check sequence. 
Because of this, tarlz protects the extended records with a Cyclic 
Redundancy Check (CRC) in a way compatible with standard tar tools.

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

An online manual for tarlz can be found at 
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/tarlz_manual.html

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

The sha256sum is:
49838effe95acb29d548b7ef2ddbb4b63face40536df0d9a80a62900c7170576 
tarlz-0.24.tar.lz


Changes in version 0.24:

  * The option '-C, --directory' is now position-dependent also for diff 
and extract. (Reported by Devon Sean McCullough).

  * Option '--uncompressed' can now be omitted if it can be deduced from 
the archive name. (An uncompressed archive name lacks a '.lz' or '.tlz' 
extension).

  * The diagnostic shown when a file being archived or an archive being 
compressed fails to read, now shows the cause of the failure; end-of-file or 
read error.

  * '-z, --compress' now exits with error status 2 if any input archive is 
an empty file.

  * A failure in the '--diff' test of the testsuite on OS/2 has been fixed. 
(Reported by Elbert Pol).


Please send bug reports and suggestions to lzip-bug@nongnu.org


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, tarlz author and maintainer.

--
If you care about data safety and long-term archiving, please consider using 
lzip. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance and
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html Thanks.