On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Patrick Wallace wrote:
> Anyone happen to know why from Red Hat 8.0 uncompress isn't part of the
> core distribution? This change appears to have broken many installation
> procedures; one presumes in a good cause.
>
> Apparently the cure is to login as root and do this:
>
> cd /usr/bin
> ln -s gunzip uncompress
> ln -s gzip compress (for good measure)
>
> But why has uncompress fallen out of favour?
Hi Patrick,
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.
There was a course the old LZW patenting issues somewhile back (probably
too far back for this), gzip was always known to be unencumbered, maybe
that helped this decision too.
Cheers,
Peter.
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