On Apr 19, 2012 10:09 AM, "Guillem Jover" <guillem@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Package: wnpp
> Severity: normal
>
> Continuing with my intention to try to match my current dissatisfaction
> with the project with my dedication to it, I've just orphaned the ppmd
> package.
>
> The package just got ported recently to 64-bit systems so builds for
> those systems need to be hand-held for now as that's not reflected
> on P-a-s yet.
>
> The package description is:
> ppmd predicts the probability of a given character based on the
> characters that immediately precede it (as all PPM compressors,
> see also Markov Chains and Context Modeling). This archiver
> should be better than zip, gzip, bzip2, zzip, szip and ppmz(2)
> at compressing files.
>
> regards,
> guillem
FYI, ppmd (at least variants H and I) is used in 7zip. Similar code to read/write 7zip is found in libarchive (and thus bsdtar). Libarchive has been ported to a wide range of systems. I think the same is true for 7zip.
So there are alternatives.
~ Andres