Hi again,
Daniel Baumann wrote:
> Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> From the Lzip manual I gather
>> that its version compares .lz, .gz, and .bz2 files, but I couldn't
>> tell whether it handles .lzma files.
>
> the manpage is not up2date (going to fix that, thanks for the pointer ;).
>
> lzdiff is just a shell script that wrapps over lzip, which means it can
> compare any format that lzip can decompress which in turn means that
> yes, it can compare lzma compressed files.
It looks like lzdiff cannot compare .lzma files after all:
$ echo 1 > a
$ echo 1 > b
$ lzma a
$ lzdiff a.lzma b
Files a.lzma and b differ
$ { echo 1; echo 2; } > b
$ lzma b
$ lzdiff a.lzma b.lzma
Files a.lzma and b.lzma differ
and I can't convince lzip to decompress a .lzma file, either. So
lzdiff is not actually an adequate replacement for LZMA Utils lzdiff.
I have a few choices:
1. Make xz-lzma conflict with lzip. This would be unfortunate, because
I would not be surprised if most scripts using the legacy LZMA Utils
commands only use lzma and unlzma, never lzdiff or lzgrep, and it
would be nice to support such scripts with lzip also installed. But in
a sense this would be the most honest thing to do.
If it were not for dpkg, most users would not need to install xz-lzma
anyway, since all its functionality is in xz-utils. And dpkg could be
taught to use xz when it's available.
2. Use alternatives or diversions to allow both xz-lzma and lzip to
install lzdiff commands. Since each package's lzdiff does something
different, this is a bad idea.
3. Only ship lzma, unlzma, and lzmadec in the xz-lzma package and stop
shipping lzdiff, lzgrep, lzmore, lzless, and so on. This would make
the xz-lzma package compatible with the lzma Debian package, which I
think just never bothered to include those.
4. Make xz-lzma ship lzma, unlzma, lzmore, lzcmp, and so on, but not
lzdiff or lzgrep so as to not conflict with lzip. I think this would
be just too confusing.
None of them seem great to me. What do you think?
Thanks,
Jonathan
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