Now the interaction of presets and custom filter chains
is described correctly. Earlier it contradicted itself.
Thanks to DevHC who reported these issues on IRC to me
on 2012-12-14.
Spot candidates by running these commands:
git ls-files |xargs perl -0777 -n \
-e 'while (/\b(then?|[iao]n|i[fst]|but|f?or|at|and|[dt]o)\s+\1\b/gims)' \
-e '{$n=($` =~ tr/\n/\n/ + 1); ($v=$&)=~s/\n/\\n/g; print "$ARGV:$n:$v\n"}'
Thanks to Jim Meyering for the original patch.
Lots of content was updated on the xz man page.
Technical improvements:
- Start a new sentence on a new line.
- Use fairly short lines.
- Use constant-width font for examples (where supported).
- Some minor cleanups.
Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for some language fixes.
For several people, the limiter causes bigger problems that
it solves, so it is better to have it disabled by default.
Those who want to have a limiter by default need to enable
it via the environment variable XZ_DEFAULTS.
Support for environment variable XZ_DEFAULTS was added. It is
parsed before XZ_OPT and technically identical with it. The
intended uses differ quite a bit though; see the man page.
The memory usage limit can now be set separately for
compression and decompression using --memlimit-compress and
--memlimit-decompress. To set both at once, -M or --memlimit
can be used. --memory was retained as a legacy alias for
--memlimit for backwards compatibility.
The semantics of --info-memory were changed in backwards
incompatible way. Compatibility wasn't meaningful due to
changes in the memory usage limiter functionality.
The memory usage limiter info is no longer shown at the
bottom of xz --long -help.
The memory usage limiter support for removed completely from xzdec.
xz's man page was updated to match the above changes. Various
unrelated fixes were also made to the man page.
Originally both base-2 and base-10 were supported, but since
there seems to be little need for base-10 in XZ Utils, treat
everything as base-2 and also be more relaxed about the case
of the first letter of the suffix. Now xz will accept e.g.
KiB, Ki, k, K, kB, and KB, and interpret them all as 1024. The
recommended spelling of the suffixes are still KiB, MiB, and GiB.
Previously the default limit was always 40 % of RAM. The
new limit is a little bit more complex:
- If 40 % of RAM is at least 80 MiB, 40 % of RAM is used
as the limit.
- If 80 % of RAM is over 80 MiB, 80 MiB is used as the limit.
- Otherwise 80 % of RAM is used as the limit.
This should make it possible to decompress files created with
"xz -9" on more systems. Swapping is generally more expected
on systems with less RAM, so higher default limit on them
shouldn't cause too bad surprises in terms of heavy swapping.
Instead, the higher default limit should reduce the number of
bad surprises when it used to prevent decompression of files
created with "xz -9". The DoS prevention system shouldn't be
a DoS itself.
Note that even with the new default limit, a system with 64 MiB
RAM cannot decompress files created with "xz -9" without user
overriding the limit. This should be OK, because if xz is going
to need more memory than the system has RAM, it will run very
very slowly and thus it's good that user has to override the limit
in that case.
a regular file.
Sparse file creation can be disabled with --no-sparse.
I don't promise yet that the name of this option won't
change before 5.0.0. It's possible that the code, that
checks when it is safe to use sparse output on stdout,
is not good enough, and a more flexible command line
option is needed to configure sparse file handling.
Currently --robot works only with --info-memory and
--version. --help and --long-help work too, but --robot
has no effect on them.
Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for the original patches.
