[Python-Dev] LZW support in tarfile ? (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Sun May 17 14:55:45 CEST 2009


Hello,

I want to remove the usage of the "tar" command in Distutils in favor or the "tarfile" module.

But, there's an option in Distutils.make_archive to create a tarball using the "compress" [1] program rather than gzip or bzip2. Using tar -Z, it will pipe it to the compress program if present. This program implements the LZW algorithm [2].

The LZW used to be patented but this patent seem to be expired in every country now [3].

On Distutils side I can work things out so the tar archive created can be piped to an arbitraty compression program when it is not compressed using bzip2 or gzip;

But I was wondering if we should we add a LZW support in tarinfo, besides gzip and bzip2 ?

Although this compression standard doesn't seem very used these days,

Regards Tarek

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compress [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZW [3] http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw

-- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org



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