Re: PSPP-BUG: [bug #20161] support automatic (de)compression for system/portable file I/O

[Mark H. Wood]

Why not look at the algorithms?

http://www.gzip.org/algorithm.txt

'deflate' does seem to buffer up the output stream for a while, but it
can flush those buffers when it determines that a fresh dictionary
should be started.  Small streams might be completely buffered, but it
becomes increasingly likely with increasing length that the output
stream will be blocked rather than retained complete.

GNU 'tar' can be instructed to pass the archive through 'compress' or
(more usually, these days) 'gzip', so there is some experience there
to draw on.

There's some discussion of bzip2 at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2

It looks like bzip2 doesn't necessarily buffer the whole stream
either.  Again, recent GNU 'tar' can pipe through bzip2 so there is
some experience with real-world behavior of this model.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   address@hidden
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

pgp6LHDlFGn8x.pgp
Description: PGP signature