Re: Debian 1.2 breaks INN, UUCP
jgoerzen@complete.org (John Goerzen) wrote on 20.12.96 in <[🔎] 199612201756.LAA09995@complete.org>:
> > In article <[🔎] 199612200447.WAA04432@complete.org> you wrote:
> > The "compress" that was part of early Debian 1.1 releases was actually a
> > link to "gzip". This was a bad thing to do, because it broke some
> > applications that expected a "compress" program to actually create
> > "compress"'ed files as output, namely the X build and some sites who did
> > UUCP'ed news to neighbors who didn't have gzip.
>
> Hmm, now this is strange. My newsfeed does not accept gzipped articles.
> And everything was working fine while the "compress" program was used. When
> I changed the config for INN to use gzip, all my outbound news was broken...
> The feed would not unpack it. So I am confused now :-)
You may have had a compress from somewhere else?
> This was the thing that irked me -- that there was no warning that compress
> was being deleted. I unfortunately have not been on debian-devel for a
As far as Debian is involved, it was never there to begin with. What was
there was a bad link.
Maybe what happened was the same that happened here while fixing the bad
link: someone installed a real compress in place of the link, and when the
next gzip wanted to remove the link (actually, dpkg does this), it removed
the real compress. This happens when people change non-config files by
hand.
> Does gzip act as "compress" did when it is invoked as "compress"? Perhaps
> that is a possibility, I don't know....
No. Gzip can decode LZW, but it can't make LZW; otherwise, it would have
the exact same patent problems that compress has.
MfG Kai
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