p7zip VS pixz

nearly every main distro I am aware of has both available. The reason you still see p7zip is because the CLI incompatibilities vs the newer 7z/7zip executables and the general licensing issues. Most users of "old p7zip" are actually using the actively maintained https://github.com/p7zip-project/p7zip which is updated, supporting unix permissions and zstd and so on.

Thank you for pointing this out! This is the source of much confusion. Although Arch for example uses https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip which seems to be reasonably maintained?

Then you can compile p7zip from source: $ mkdir p7zip-git $ cd p7zip-git $ git clone https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip .

April 4th was the latest release. Had some commits in May. I think it is active.

I think the point is, the '7z' at 17.04 available in Arch Linux's repo is actually p7zip, the development of which is independent of 7-zip. So comparison of the version number is meaningless (if I am right). Also, p7zip 17.04 is released in April this year, not 2017, according to its release page

this comment might clarify that.

That's really confusing since `pixz` exists and its "pixie" pronunciation actually works

https://github.com/vasi/pixz

pixz (https://github.com/vasi/pixz) is a nice parallel xz that additionally creates an index of tar files so you can decompress individual files. I wonder if dpkg could be extended to do something similar.

There's pixz, which indexes the tarball, allowing listing/extracting individual paths without decompressing the whole thing.

Also relevant is pixz [1] which can do parallel LZMA/XZ decompression as well as tar file indexing.

[1] https://github.com/vasi/pixz

Yes, it's as easy as installing pixz with symlinks pointing to xz (I think Debian even does this automatically as part of its post-installation scripts).

pixz - Parallel, indexed xz compressor. BSD-2-Clause

Not quite what you're asking, but if you're a 7-Zip fan and on Linux, you might be interested in pixz.