New package zutils

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello,

Vincent Lefevre (maintainer of the MPFR package) suggested that 
utilities like zdiff, bzdiff, lzdiff, etc, should be provided 
independently of compressors. So I have written a package named zutils 
where I include such utilities with support for gzip, bzip2, lzip and 
uncompressed files. (Support for other compressors may be added later).

I am writing you because the most obvious names for such utilities are
the names of the utilities already distributed with gzip. I hope we can
cooperate to avoid name clashes in distributions. I think the best way 
is gzip, bzip2 and lzip stop distributing their respective utilities and 
distributions provide the zutils port/package to replace those utilities.

Alternatively, gzip utilities could be renamed to gzcat, gzdiff, etc.

If you want to check the concept, the zutils tarball can be downloaded 
from http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/

With zutils you can do:
zdiff file1.lz file2.gz
zdiff file1.bz2 file2
  or
lzgrep "string" file1 file2.lz file3.gz file4.bz2


Best regards,
Antonio.