On 2017-02-22 16:23 +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Package: gzip
> Version: 1.6-5
> Severity: wishlist
>
> Dear Maintainer,
> I came to know that gzip v1.8 was released quite sometime back but it
> isn't in Debian :(
>
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-04/msg00012.html
>
> Release can be seen at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.8.tar.xz
> or/and http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gzip/gzip-1.8.tar.gz . I did see the
> debian/watch file is acting fine sharing about the new release.
>
> I cloned the gzip repo. and did a shortlog comparison between the two
> tagged releases to know what changed -
>
> I did take a brief look at the changelog and while I have no idea of
> gzip internals, most of the changelog seems to be about the
> compile/build-depends to be current (new versions) and removal of dead
> code (probably some code refactoring) .
The biggest change is certainly the deprecation of the GZIP variable, as
mentioned in the NEWS file. If this is really going to be followed by
removing support for it, it will have a *huge* impact, but even the
current state is quite annoying, for instance instead of using
GZIP=-9 tar czf foo.tar.gz foo/
you are apparently supposed to write
tar cf - foo/ | gzip -9 > foo.tar.gz
setting you back by some 25 years (the -z option was introduced in tar
1.11.2, released 1993).
Cheers,
Sven
