On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Patrick Wallace wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Peter W. Draper wrote:
>
>> as far as I know, there wasn't a good reason for this, just that gzip can
>> do the job, so why bother. The proper commands are still distributed in
>> the "ncompress" rpm.
>
> I would say that just because two well-established existing commands
> overlap in functionality that doesn't justify summarily ditching one of
> them, because it will break existing scripts (such as the Mathematica
> installation procedure). If compress/uncompress are known to be either
> deprecated or obsolete then it would be OK.
Indeed, as far as I can tell uncompress/compress are part of the UNIX
standard, but only at the XSI level, that makes them optional. So the
moral is they are standard, but cannot be relied upon.
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