lzma (Re: HEADS UP: upgrading ImageMagick to 6.4.0-6)

[Christian Weisgerber]

Andrew Pantyukhin <infofarmer at freebsd.org> wrote:

> We had a talk with naddy about it, but since there are people
> using archivers/lzma with whatever syntax it has, in scripted
> environments, I'm inclined not to surprise them very much. I
> think a wrapper can be added to lzmautils for full
> backwards-compatibility, I may look at it later.
> 
> Also, the lzmautils website claims it's of alpha-quality, so I'm
> also hesitant to rely on it completely.

Yes.  The plan is to reorganize the code into a full liblzma and a
lzma frontend program, just like libz/gzip and libbz2/bzip2.
Importantly, they also intend to change the file format, probably
by wrapping it into a container that has a fixed signature at the
start and allows for integrity checking.

So far this is still vaporware, but if it comes to pass, I expect
we will shortly see .tar.lzma (.tlz) archives in the new format and
the SDK lzma will probably not be able to handle them.

> OTOH, changing lzmautils' lzma to another name would probably
> confuse gtar (I'm not sure though).

This could be easily patched.
However, I expect other operating systems, particularly Linux, to
standardize on LZMA Utils for _the_ lzma program, and I don't want
FreeBSD to be the odd man out there.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de