[Python-Dev] LZW support in tarfile ?

[Tarek Ziadé]

Hello,

I want to remove the usage of the "tar" command in Distutils in favor
or the "tarfile" module.

But, there's an option in Distutils.make_archive to create a tarball
using the "compress" [1] program rather than gzip or bzip2.
Using tar -Z, it will pipe it to the compress program if present. This
program implements the LZW algorithm [2].

The LZW used to be patented but this patent seem to be expired in
every country now [3].

On Distutils side I can work things out so the tar archive created can
be piped to an arbitraty compression program when it is
not compressed using bzip2 or gzip;

But I was wondering if we should we add a LZW support in tarinfo,
besides gzip and bzip2 ?

Although this compression standard doesn't seem very used these days,

Regards
Tarek

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compress
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZW
[3] http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw


-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org