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.
Perhaps what offended the Red Hat tecchies is that the command names were
self-explanatory, which rather goes against the Unix grain.
> 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.
It did occur to me that there might be patent issues behind the decision.
Patrick Wallace
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