Online Archives

Online Archives

[Mark Mitchell]

The online archives of the egcs mailing lists have one flaw: the
patches posted there don't work when saved from Netscape.  I get
messages like:

  patch: **** malformed patch at line 11: set gccpath [file dirname [file dirname ${base_dir}]]

  supernova% patch < ~/tmp/patch
  patch: **** malformed patch at line 34: set gccpath [file dirname [file dirname ${base_dir}]]

I even tried this one of my own patches, which I knew must have been
wellformed! :-)  I assume that the archiving software is screwing this
up; does anyone know if there's a way around it?  This happens both
with cut-and-paste from the broswer, and with File/Save from the menu
when selecting either "Source" or "Text".

Thanks,

-- 
Mark Mitchell		mmitchell@usa.net
Stanford University	http://www.stanford.edu

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Julian Seward]

Joe Buck wrote:
> 
> > BWT was invented by people working for digital, and to my information they
> > either already hold a patent or want to apply for one.
> 
> If they still "want to apply for one", they cannot.  In the US, they
> have one year from date of first publication to apply.  In most other
> countries, they must have filed the patent before first publication.
> (This is why the RSA patent is only good in the US -- they delayed the
> patent application).
> 
> So either they have a patent, or they have completed an application and
> it is working its way through the process.  There are no other possibilities.
> 
> > DEC "said" they don't want to exploit the BWT commercially, but that's what
> > unisys said about LZW...
> 
> Do you have contacts for any of the BWT people?  We could ask ...

Perhaps I should be clearer.

To the best of my knowledge, bzip2 doesn't use any patented algorithms.
However, clearly, as an individual, I don't have the resources to
conduct
a proper patent search myself.  So I cannot actually guarantee this.

The "Wheeler" in BWT is a prof at Cambridge.  email is 
djw3@cl.cam.ac.uk.  I don't have an email contact for Mike Burrows.

J

970828 snapshot

[Jeffrey A Law]

I'm away from the office right now, but I figured I'd go ahead and
put the 970828 snapshot up for ftp.

Diffs are included to bring 970825 up to 970828.  There are no changes
in the testsuite directory itself, so there's no need to fetch the
diff.gz files for the testsuites.

I'll update the snapshot web page when I get back to the office later
tonight.  I'll also look through some of the submissions from today
(like the sh rtems port).


Enjoy!
Jeff

Jeff Law (law@cygnus.com)
Cygnus Solutions		EGCS GNU Compiler System
http://www.cygnus.com		http://www.cygnus.com/egcs

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Marc Lehmann]

Julian Seward wrote:
>Oleg Krivosheev wrote:
>> bzip2 author dropped arithmetic compression
>> thus removing patent dependance.
>
>Yes, that's exactly right.  And I don't think the the BWT is patented,
>so AFAIK thw whole program is "safe".
>

BWT was invented by people working for digital, and to my information they
either already hold a patent or want to apply for one.

DEC "said" they don't want to exploit the BWT commercially, but that's what
unisys said about LZW...

So, although I'd like to see bzip2-compressed files, I'd make this an option
at most, so that switching to gzip is easy, if any problems might arise.
Having .bz2 files *only*, is, of course, not an option.. forcing
users to download and build a decompresser first isn't feasible.

I already plan to do this on my servers (maybe for the egcs mirror, too), so
that, if you want to save download time, you should use a mirror that
automatically re-compresses to bzip2.

Or are there any (legal?) problems when the egcs files are available
as .gz and .bz2 ?


      -----==-
      ----==-- _
      ---==---(_)__  __ ____  __       Marc Lehmann
      --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ /       pcg@goof.com
      -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\
    The choice of a GNU generation

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Julian Seward]

>   > Would you consider compressing egcs with a better compressor?  The
>   > question would be a bit academic but for the fact that I can offer you
>   > such a beast.  It's GNU GPL'd, patent-free, reasonably fast, portable,
>   > and command-line compatible with gzip.
> Cool.  I'd like to get out from under the initial mail deluge from
> this project before we try to tackle this kind of issue.

Sure; have been listening in on egcs mailing list; there's clearly
a lot going on.  Whenever.
 
> IMHO, if we went this route we'd probably have to provide both -- gzip
> is much more widely used than bzip2.

Yes, you definitely can't just jump from one to the other without
some kind of transitional arrangements.

Keep me posted.

J

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message <34020C00.462F1002@muraroa.demon.co.uk>you write:
  > I built egcs-ss-970821 for i486-linux-elf for c only, and it seems to
  > work, as far as my superficial tests can determine.  It's good to see
  > further development of gcc2.
Thanks.

  > Would you consider compressing egcs with a better compressor?  The
  > question would be a bit academic but for the fact that I can offer you
  > such a beast.  It's GNU GPL'd, patent-free, reasonably fast, portable,
  > and command-line compatible with gzip.
Cool.  I'd like to get out from under the initial mail deluge from
this project before we try to tackle this kind of issue.

IMHO, if we went this route we'd probably have to provide both -- gzip
is much more widely used than bzip2.

jeff

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Julian Seward]

Oleg Krivosheev wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Joe Buck wrote:
> 
> > Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 17:13:53 -0700 (PDT)
> > From: Joe Buck <jbuck@synopsys.com>
> > To: Julian Seward <Julian_Seward@muraroa.demon.co.uk>
> > Cc: law@cygnus.com, egcs@cygnus.com
> > Subject: Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available
> >
> >
> > > Would you consider compressing egcs with a better compressor?  The
> > > question would be a bit academic but for the fact that I can offer you
> > > such a beast.  It's GNU GPL'd, patent-free, reasonably fast, portable,
> > > and command-line compatible with gzip.
> >
> > > The compressor's called "bzip2"; an early version of it has seen
> > > some use in the Linux community over the past year.
> >
> > Sorry, bzip is not patent-free; it is most emphatically covered by a patent.
> > Unless bzip2 has nothing at all in common with bzip, it cannot be used.
> 
> from recent announcement in c.o.l.a looks like
> bzip2 author dropped arithmetic compression
> thus removing patent dependance.

Yes, that's exactly right.  And I don't think the the BWT is patented,
so AFAIK thw whole program is "safe".

J

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Oleg Krivosheev]

On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Joe Buck wrote:

> Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 17:13:53 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Joe Buck <jbuck@synopsys.com>
> To: Julian Seward <Julian_Seward@muraroa.demon.co.uk>
> Cc: law@cygnus.com, egcs@cygnus.com
> Subject: Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available
> 
> 
> > Would you consider compressing egcs with a better compressor?  The
> > question would be a bit academic but for the fact that I can offer you
> > such a beast.  It's GNU GPL'd, patent-free, reasonably fast, portable,
> > and command-line compatible with gzip.
> 
> > The compressor's called "bzip2"; an early version of it has seen
> > some use in the Linux community over the past year.
> 
> Sorry, bzip is not patent-free; it is most emphatically covered by a patent.
> Unless bzip2 has nothing at all in common with bzip, it cannot be used.

from recent announcement in c.o.l.a looks like 
bzip2 author dropped arithmetic compression
thus removing patent dependance.

regards

OK

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Jeff Epler]

On Mon, Aug 25, 1997 at 05:13:53PM -0800, Joe Buck wrote:
> Sorry, bzip is not patent-free; it is most emphatically covered by a patent.
> Unless bzip2 has nothing at all in common with bzip, it cannot be used.

As the web page notes, there's no arithmetic coding anymore, it's
BWT and huffman.

Is BWT patented?

Jeff
-- 
\/ jepler@inetnebr.com http://incolor.inetnebr.com/jepler/ (0|1(01*0)*1)+
The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
		-- Hegel

I know guys can't learn from yesterday ... Hegel must be taking the long view.
		-- John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar"

Re: Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Joe Buck]

> Would you consider compressing egcs with a better compressor?  The
> question would be a bit academic but for the fact that I can offer you
> such a beast.  It's GNU GPL'd, patent-free, reasonably fast, portable,
> and command-line compatible with gzip.

> The compressor's called "bzip2"; an early version of it has seen
> some use in the Linux community over the past year.

Sorry, bzip is not patent-free; it is most emphatically covered by a patent.
Unless bzip2 has nothing at all in common with bzip, it cannot be used.

Suggestion re: 970825 Snapshot Available

[Julian Seward]

Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> 
> egcs-ss-970825 is now available in ftp.cygnus.com:/pub/egcs/snapshots
> (and on various mirrors shortly, see the home page for mirror sites).
[...]

I built egcs-ss-970821 for i486-linux-elf for c only, and it seems to
work, as far as my superficial tests can determine.  It's good to see
further development of gcc2.

I wondered if I could interest you in the following.  I imagine a lot
of people will be interested in trying egcs.  People with slow (modem
only) connections, like me, have some difficulty downloading egcs.  I
only have a 14.4k modem, and it took nearly two hours.  I guess many
people will have 28.8k or better modems, but it still takes on the
order of an hour.

Would you consider compressing egcs with a better compressor?  The
question would be a bit academic but for the fact that I can offer you
such a beast.  It's GNU GPL'd, patent-free, reasonably fast, portable,
and command-line compatible with gzip.

It saves nearly two megabytes for egcs:

   -rw-r--r--   37304320 Aug 25 12:04 egcs-ss-970821.tar
   -rw-r--r--    8043075 Aug 25 15:57 egcs-ss-970821.tar.gz
   -rw-r--r--    6169539 Aug 25 12:04 egcs-ss-970821.tar.bz2

For me that's around half an hour less on the phone, and also less
bandwidth on your servers.  Of course, people would have to download a
copy of the compressor, but that's about 300k for the source distrib,
or ~100k for a binary, so it would be a win even on the first
download.

The compressor's called "bzip2"; an early version of it has seen
some use in the Linux community over the past year.  You can
get it from http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk .

Probably a rather strange-sounding proposition, but a serious one.

Julian Seward