[Zutils-bug] please reintroduce zutils binary

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

version 1.2 removed the zutils binary. I want to plead for its re-inclusion for
the next zutils release.

Many distributions supply a gzip package which supplies the same binaries that
zutils provides (zcat, zcmp, zdiff...) though of course limited to extracting
gzip. So when one installs zutils, these binaries are replaced by the ones from
zutils. Though nothing prevents a system admin to change /bin/zcat back to the
version provided by the gzip package without uninstalling zutils. This poses a
problem for packages that want to depend on the additional functionality
provided by the zutils version of the tools. They can no longer depend on
zutils being installed if they want to rely on /bin/zcat providing transparent
decompression of more than gzip.  This means that software that wants to use
the zutils version of /bin/zcat needs to check whether /bin/zcat comes from
gzip or zutils at runtime. If they find out it comes from gzip, then it is not
possible for them to fall back to an alternative binary.

One way to solve this problem would be if zutils would reintroduce the zutils
binary which was removed in the 1.2 release. Then software which wants to use
the zutils version of zcat could just run "zutils --zcat" and would not need
any additional checks.

I think because of this problem, the zutils binary was very useful and I would
wholeheartedly welcome if it was reintroduced.

What do you think?

Please keep me CC-ed as I'm not subscribed.

cheers, josch