[ITP] pbzip2 (and what was the upshot on pbzip2/libbz2 incompatibility?)

[Peter Li]

On 8/8/2011 10:13 AM, Jon TURNEY wrote:
> On 08/08/2011 17:46, Peter Li wrote:
>> Thanks! I guess ultimately what I'm keen to know is whether this was 
>> a problem
>> that is pbzip2's "fault" (and did bugs get submitted to them) or a 
>> problem
>> that was purely setup.exe's "fault" or some other category...
>
> This was definitely a bug in setup.
>
> The bug was that a bzip2 compressed file may contain multiple
> compressed streams, which should be decompressed and concatenated, but 
> setup assumed that only a single stream would be present.
>
> Files compressed using pbzip2 usually contains multiple streams (The 
> technique which pbzip uses to parallelize compression should be 
> obvious :-)), whereas files compressed using bzip2 seem to only 
> contain one stream, so no problem was noticed until attempting to use 
> files compressed using pbzip2.
>
> Google seemed to indicate that this was a popular mistake to make in 
> libbz2-using applications :-)

Ah, thanks much for the details.  So essentially pbzip2 doesn't do 
anything "wrong", yet it may still break things unexpectedly...  :)