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[Lzip-bug] Tarlz 0.19 released


From: Antonio Diaz Diaz
Subject: [Lzip-bug] Tarlz 0.19 released
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2021 20:05:23 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14

I am pleased to announce the release of tarlz 0.19.

Tarlz is a massively parallel (multi-threaded) combined implementation of the tar archiver and the lzip compressor. Tarlz uses the compression library lzlib.

Tarlz creates tar archives using a simplified and safer variant of the POSIX pax format compressed in lzip format, keeping the alignment between tar members and lzip members. The resulting multimember tar.lz archive is fully backward compatible with standard tar tools like GNU tar, which treat it like any other tar.lz archive. Tarlz can append files to the end of such compressed archives.

Keeping the alignment between tar members and lzip members has two advantages. It adds an indexed lzip layer on top of the tar archive, making it possible to decode the archive safely in parallel. It also minimizes the amount of data lost in case of corruption. Compressing a tar archive with plzip may even double the amount of files lost for each lzip member damaged because it does not keep the members aligned.

Tarlz can create tar archives with five levels of compression granularity: per file (--no-solid), per block (--bsolid, default), per directory (--dsolid), appendable solid (--asolid), and solid (--solid). It can also create uncompressed tar archives.

Of course, compressing each file (or each directory) individually can't achieve a compression ratio as high as compressing solidly the whole tar archive, but it has the following advantages:

    * The resulting multimember tar.lz archive can be decompressed in
      parallel, multiplying the decompression speed.

    * New members can be appended to the archive (by removing the EOF
      member), and unwanted members can be deleted from the archive.
      Just like an uncompressed tar archive.

    * It is a safe POSIX-style backup format. In case of corruption,
      tarlz can extract all the undamaged members from the tar.lz
      archive, skipping over the damaged members, just like the standard
      (uncompressed) tar. Moreover, the option '--keep-damaged' can be
      used to recover as much data as possible from each damaged member,
      and lziprecover can be used to recover some of the damaged members.

    * A multimember tar.lz archive is usually smaller than the
      corresponding solidly compressed tar.gz archive, except when
      individually compressing files smaller than about 32 KiB.

Note that the POSIX pax format has a serious flaw. The metadata stored in pax extended records are not protected by any kind of check sequence. Because of this, tarlz protects the extended records with a CRC in a way compatible with standard tar tools.

The homepage is at http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/tarlz.html

An online manual for tarlz can be found at http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/tarlz_manual.html

The sources can be downloaded from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/tarlz/

The sha256sum is:
3639eb55f97be324efe90dcdbcc77a4851770363722425d5fd3b8e934aa1aa27 tarlz-0.19.tar.lz


Changes in version 0.19:

* A missing '#include <sys/types.h>', which made compilation fail on some systems, has been added.

* At verbosity level 1 or higher tarlz now prints a diagnostic for each unknown extended header keyword found in an archive, once per keyword.


Please send bug reports and suggestions to lzip-bug@nongnu.org


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, tarlz author and maintainer.
Self-determination is a human right. Free Catalan political prisoners.
--
If you care about data safety and long-term archiving, please consider using lzip. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance and
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html Thanks.




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