Re: [kernel.org users] XZ Migration discussion

[Lasse Collin]

On 2010-02-14 Phillip Lougher wrote:
> With xz you have just one C/C++ implementation with a single library
> with an undocumented API for C/C++ programmers.

I completely agree that language support is bad compared to the .gz 
format, but I think the above sentence makes it sound a bit too bad.

There are three C (no C++ needed) libraries that support the .xz format:
  - LZMA SDK (7-zip.org)
  - XZ Utils has liblzma (tukaani.org)
  - XZ Embedded (tukaani.org, limited support only)

The latter two are more or less based on LZMA SDK, although the code 
looks very different (different coding style, different APIs etc.).

The liblzma API has reference documentation as Doxygen tags in the API 
headers. They aren't the best docs and there's no tutorial or example 
programs yet, but the API certainly isn't undocumented. It has 
similarities to the zlib API, so those used to zlib shouldn't have 
trouble learning the basic features of liblzma, which are enough for 
most people.

There are liblzma bindings for Perl and Python, but I don't know how 
good they are.

-- 
Lasse Collin  |  IRC: Larhzu @ IRCnet & Freenode
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