1 xz-utils (4.999.9beta+20100212-2) unstable; urgency=low
3 The tiny xzdec and lzmadec decompressors have been moved to the new
4 xzdec package. One can use xzcat (which is an abbreviation for
5 “xz --decompress --stdout”) to replace them where space is not a
8 -- Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:24:10 -0600
10 xz-utils (4.999.9beta+20100117-1) unstable; urgency=low
12 From this version on, xz produces sparse files by default when
13 decompressing. This saves disk space when reproducing files with long
14 runs of zero bytes, such as file system images. Implementing this
15 feature requires seeking forward beyond the end of a file so that the
16 operating system knows where to put in a hole.
18 If you use xz --decompress to write to end of a file that is appended
19 to at the same time by another process, this could cause concurrent
20 output from the other command to be overwritten. This is a rare and
21 quite weird thing to do. If you really want to do it, note that xz’s
22 buffering strategy is not part of its documented interface; to safely
23 interleave concurrent output from xz and another command, a
26 xz --decompress input.xz | dd ibs=1k obs=1k >> log
28 would be needed to avoid unpredictable results.
30 -- Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:51:37 -0600