From: Massimiliano Mirra <list@...>
Date: 2002-01-15T07:59:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Best way for platf. independent compression?

On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 01:49:27AM +0900, Thomas wrote:
> ruby/zlib is a ruby wrapper for zlib. Zlib is a stable library written
> in C that provides deflation/inflation compression and support for
> reading and writing .gz (gzip) files. There is no package format in
> zlib only compression (unless you count .gz files as a package format
> that can only hold a single file). ruby/zlib is unlikely to be very
> buggy as it is only a wrapper around a quite stable tried and tested
> library.
> 
> rubyzip (which I wrote myself) is a pure ruby implementation (that
> relies on ruby/zlib, which is not!) that provides support for reading
> the familiar pkzip .zip files. All it does is interpret the pkzip
> package format. The decompression is left to ruby/zlib. Beyond the
> unit test suite I wrote for it, it hasn't been tested at all - the
> reason being that I wrote the bulk of it over a weekend to learn ruby,
> not because I needed it for anything :-) However the unit test suite
> is quite good, and rubyzip is only about 420 lines of ruby, so there
> is not room for that many bugs ;-) To use it you need the latest 0.5
> version of ruby/zlib - it is not quite ready yet, but you can get the
> latest prerelease at http://www.blue.sky.or.jp/atelier/ruby/. I hope
> that ruby/zlib will be included into the main ruby distribution, so
> people can someday use rubyzip without the hassle of having to compile
> and install another ruby extension first :-)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Thomas

Thanks a lot, Thomas.  Please shed some light on a couple of points:
does rubyzip only decompress?  (Which would be fine for our purposes!)
You say that it depends on ruby/zlib for decompression of .zip, but
doesn't ruby/zlib handle .gz's?  Does ruby/zlib run effortlessly on
every Ruby-supported platform?

And yes, inclusion of a compression library, even a simple one, in
standard Ruby distribution, would be a *big big big* plus for package
handling.

Massimiliano