pigz VS pixz

You can grab the version from the solaris userland repo I linked and use it without me completing a homework assignment. Just grab the pigz-2.3.4 source then apply the patches from [1] in the proper order. Maybe some of them aren't needed for non-Solaris.

1. https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/tree/master/compo...

I thought I had opened a PR for that a long while ago, but it doesn't show up on github these days. In any case, I did ask Mark Adler to review it. It was never a priority, then the code changed in ways that I don't really want to deal with.

While looking through the PRs, I noticed a PR for Blocked GZip Format (BGZF) [2]. That's very interesting, and perhaps suggests that bgzip is a tool you would be interested in.

2. https://github.com/madler/pigz/pull/19

The bit I found most interesting was actually:

https://github.com/madler/pigz/blob/master/try.h

https://github.com/madler/pigz/blob/master/try.c

which implements try/catch for C99.

pigz seems to be able to do it. https://github.com/madler/pigz

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.