GNU grep 2.5.4 released

[Tony Abou-Assaleh-2]

I'm pleased to announce the release of GNU grep 2.5.4.

GNU grep is a pattern matching program. The grep command searches one or
more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern.
The pattern can be a fixed string or a regular expression. By default,
grep prints the matching lines.

This is primarily a bug-fix release. For a complete list of changes
please refer to the ChangeLog file.

Thanks to all the people who have been testing, reporting bugs,
contributing code, suggesting enhancements, providing feedback, and
answering user questions on the mailing lists <bug-grep@...>. Thanks
to all the translators. Special thanks to Karl Berry for his guidance
and support leading to my first release as a maintainer of grep.

You can find the new release here:

    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.gz
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.gz.sig
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.bz2
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.bz2.sig

Soon it will also appear on the sources and GNU mirrors which
are listed here:

    http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html

The MD5 checksums are:

    92258031d98d4f12dfc6a6d24057e672  grep-2.5.4.tar.gz
    5650ee2ae6ea4b39e9459d7d0585b315  grep-2.5.4.tar.bz2

The GNU grep official Web site is:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/

Please report bugs and feedback to <bug-grep@...>.

The grep development discussion happen on the mailing list
<bug-grep@...>. To join, visit:

    http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grep

Cheers,

TAA

--
Tony Abou-Assaleh, PhD
Email:    taa@...
Web site: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net

[Tony Abou-Assaleh-2]

Hi Antonio,

I am forwarding your request to the grep development mailing list for
consideration. Whether lzipped tarball of grep are release will depend
of the feedback I receive from the community. Particularly, if there is
demand for them then I'm personally in favour.

Thanks for putting this forward and the detailed info.

Cheers,

TAA

--
Tony Abou-Assaleh, PhD
Email:    taa@...
Web site: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tabouasssaleh
Twitter:  http://twitter.com/tony_aa



Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Would you accept a lzipped tarball of grep to be distributed along
> with the gzipped one? The size savings are about 30% and 16% with
> respect to gzip and bzip2.
>
> -rw-r--r--  1 antonio users 860636 2009-02-10 17:07 grep-2.5.4.tar.gz
> -rw-r--r--  1 antonio users 723181 2009-02-10 17:07 grep-2.5.4.tar.bz2
> -rw-r--r--  1 antonio users 606033 2009-02-10 17:07 grep-2.5.4.tar.lz
>
> Or if you prefer to make it yourself, lzip can be found here:
> http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html
> http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/
> http://packages.debian.org/sid/lzip
>
>
> Also, by using zgrep from zutils[1][2], I hope you can avoid bloating
> grep with decompression code[3] and non-standard options.
> [1] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/zutils.html
> [2] http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/zutils-0.1.tar.gz
> [3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grep/2008-04/msg00016.html
>
>
> Regards,
> Antonio.

[Tim Waugh]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 00:12 -0300, Tony Abou-Assaleh wrote:
> Hi Antonio,
>
> I am forwarding your request to the grep development mailing list for
> consideration. Whether lzipped tarball of grep are release will depend
> of the feedback I receive from the community. Particularly, if there is
> demand for them then I'm personally in favour.
>
> Thanks for putting this forward and the detailed info.

Use xz, which is newer and the file format is now stable.

Tim.
*/

[Reuben Thomas]

> Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
>> Also, by using zgrep from zutils[1][2], I hope you can avoid bloating
>> grep with decompression code[3] and non-standard options.

A word about this. In an ideal world, transparent decompression would
happen in a standard API atop stdio, and all text utilities would
support it, offering a single flag to turn it off (it would be on by
default). If someone would like to work on that, great.

I most often need this feature is for grep. The "zgrep" shell scripts
that have become common in recent years help, but have various
problems; zutils seems to overcome most of them. However, zutils still
leave one problem: the name is not the same. They also add an
additional dependency. I want to be able to get transparent
decompression on any system with GNU grep.

However, in practical terms, if you can get zutils into Debian and
Ubuntu in such a way that when I type "grep" I get zgrep &c. then my
wish is fulfilled. I first submitted my patch to grep 3 years ago, so
maybe your way is quicker!

--
http://rrt.sc3d.org
L’art des vers est de transformer en beautés les faiblesses (Aragon)

[Reuben Thomas]

By the way, I updated my patch again to remove some spurious
whitespace changes that I just noticed.

https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/index.php?6107

--
http://rrt.sc3d.org
Belief marks the line at which our thinking stops (Carse)

Tim Waugh wrote:
> Use xz, which is newer and the file format is now stable.

Xz is not newer. It is simply the new name of lzma-utils[1].
[1]
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=200812311955.00120.lasse.collin%40tukaani.org&forum_name=lzmautils-announce
"The new code base of LZMA Utils was renamed to XZ Utils."

Lzip is stable, and has been so thoroughly tested that I can almost
guarantee it has no data losing bugs. Xz on the other hand is in beta,
and includes a lot of features not needed for source code distribution.

Even the author of xz admits that "using a beta software with tons of
unneeded features didn't sound a good idea"[2].
[2] http://tukaani.org/pkgtools/details

The new features of the xz format (filters, filter chaining), in case
they are really useful, can be more conveniently provided by separate
utilities that can then be included in zutils[3] and used with any
compressor.
[3] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/zutils.html


Regards,
Antonio.

[Jim Meyering]

Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
...
> [3] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/zutils.html

Hi Antonio,

I would like to distribute compression-stream-agnostic scripts like
those in your zutils package via gzip releases.

Would you be willing to contribute those to gzip and assign copyright?

Jim

Hello Jim,

Jim Meyering wrote:
> I would like to distribute compression-stream-agnostic scripts like
> those in your zutils package via gzip releases.

Are you sure this is a good idea? Vincent Lefevre (maintainer of the
MPFR package) suggested that utilities like zdiff, bzdiff, lzdiff, etc,
should be provided independently of compressors. Some other people,
including me, think this is the best way of providing such utilities.

Zutils is beta software, and I am doing frequent releases. Are you going
to release a new version of gzip every time one of the scripts needs a
change?


> Would you be willing to contribute those to gzip and assign copyright?

Of course you can distribute zutils with gzip if you like, but my
current plans are exactly the opposite. I wrote to Paul Eggert
(maintainer of gzip) and to bug-gzip[1] asking him to stop distributing
those utilities, (or rename gzip utilities to gzcat, gzdiff, etc), so
that distributions could provide the zutils package to replace the
gzip-only utilities.
[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2009-08/msg00000.html


Regards,
Antonio.