gzip-1.3.11

[Matthew Burgess]

New version:

Major changes in Gzip 1.3.11 (2007-02-05)

• As per the GNU coding standards, the behavior of gzip and its companion executables no longer depend on the name used to invoke them. For example, 'gzip' and 'gunzip' are no longer hard links; instead, 'gunzip' is now a small program that invokes 'gzip -d'.

• zdiff now checks for subsidiary gzip failures, and works around bugs in IRIX 6 sh, Tru64 4.0F ksh, and Solaris 8 bash.

[Matthew Burgess]

Because of the change of some utilities from hardlinks to actual binaries as detailed above, our instructions need to change:

mv -v /usr/bin/gzip /bin
rm -v /usr/bin/{gunzip,zcat}
ln -sv gzip /bin/gunzip
ln -sv gzip /bin/zcat
ln -sv gzip /bin/compress
ln -sv gunzip /bin/uncompress

now simply becomes

mv -v /usr/bin/{gunzip,gzip,zcat} /bin # to achieve FHS binary location compliance

Note that, although the binaries above are placed in the /bin directory as specified by the FHS, that spec actually states that gunzip and zcat should be symlinks or hardlinks to gzip. As the GNU standards and FHS conflict with each other on this point, we'll stick with upstream's wishes and they have reported the problem with the FHS maintainers as outlined at ​http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2007-02/msg00011.html.

The gzip -> compress link is incorrect as detailed in ​http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2007-02/msg00009.html so has been removed.

I also couldn't see a reason for uncompress to be in /bin (it's not in FHS, LSB or our bootscripts) so it's going to stay in /usr/bin.

[Matthew Burgess]

As Steve Crosby points out at ​http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-book/2007-February/020420.html, the shell script wrappers hard code $(prefix)/bin into the PATH. Although this doesn't break things, it has the potential to cause some surprises. We can fix it by customizing the installation locations somewhat (thanks to Dan Nicholson):

./configure --prefix='/usr' --bindir=/bin
make
make check
make install
mv -v /bin/{gzexe,zcmp,zdiff,zegrep,zfgrep,zforce,zgrep,zless,zmore,znew} /usr/bin

[Matthew Burgess]

Fixed in r7916.

[Jeremy Huntwork]

Milestone 6.3 deleted