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Re: [ITP] pbzip2 (and what was the upshot on pbzip2/libbz2 incompatibility?)


On 8/8/2011 10:13 AM, Jon TURNEY wrote:
On 08/08/2011 17:46, Peter Li wrote:
Thanks! I guess ultimately what I'm keen to know is whether this was a problem
that is pbzip2's "fault" (and did bugs get submitted to them) or a problem
that was purely setup.exe's "fault" or some other category...

This was definitely a bug in setup.


The bug was that a bzip2 compressed file may contain multiple
compressed streams, which should be decompressed and concatenated, but setup assumed that only a single stream would be present.


Files compressed using pbzip2 usually contains multiple streams (The technique which pbzip uses to parallelize compression should be obvious :-)), whereas files compressed using bzip2 seem to only contain one stream, so no problem was noticed until attempting to use files compressed using pbzip2.

Google seemed to indicate that this was a popular mistake to make in libbz2-using applications :-)

Ah, thanks much for the details. So essentially pbzip2 doesn't do anything "wrong", yet it may still break things unexpectedly... :)



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