xz (formerly known as lzma utils) has gone beta!

As Lasse Collin, the author of xz & liblzma promised, xz went beta before the end of the year and he release the first beta a few hours before midnight.

This means that the API is now final and that the format is stable and ready for use!

This is great news as this new format, library and tool adds a lot of neat functionality and is sure to become an extremely important format over the years and should most definitively replace bzip2 in most cases by any sane person!

I’ve started on updating support for it in various tools, beggining with rpm5 which now supports both the legacy lzma_alone format as well as xz for payload now. I should get around to update the kde lzma filter patch as well for this now and this time it should also be ready for submitting upstream. :)

PylibLZMA will then also of course be a priority, but since this python module implements the whole liblzma api it may take some longer, but I did promise Lasse to get around to it soon to review the API, so I guess I shouldn’t delay it for too long..

I’ve also now switched completely to using the new xz tool in cooker now which has backwards compatibility for old lzma format, keeping the old behaviour when using the old command names, so the old 4.32.7 C++ version is gone now, this will also eliminate the dependency on c++ in our basesystem which is also very nice!

Congrats to Lasse, I know he’s put tons of work, efforts and stress in this and it’s great to see him finally get the beta released making it fully ready for adoption!

PS: The new release can be found here.

2009
01/05
POSTED BY
proyvind
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    • David Naylor
    • January 12th, 2009

    Hi,

    I am currently developing a port for your library to run on FreeBSD. Do you have any ETA when the next release of pyliblzma will be and will you be changing the name?

    Regards,

    David

  2. Well, I guess that doing a release just adding support for xz can be done in fairly short time, I have more features to add related to that, but those are less critical..
    So I guess it’s just a matter of motivation, maybe sometime this week maybe..

    For the name, I will keep it, the library is still named liblzma and will stay with that name, so same goes for pyliblzma. :)

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