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.
>
> 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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It was included in RHEL 3. I think they moved it to an optional package
rather than a base package, so it did not get installed with a default
installation (check your install CDs for the ncompress RPM).
Steve.
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