ext2fs Compression Patches

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The e2compr package consists of a set of patches and utilities written primarily by Antoine Dumesnil de Maricourt (dumesnil@etca.fr) to provide transparent compression and decompression in the second extended (ext2) filesystem. Reasons you might wish to use e2compr:

• It reduces hard disk usage. (Robert Budzynski: ``Everyone knows that you never really have enough disk space, no matter how much you do have.'')
• Unlike Zlibc, new files can be compressed automatically without your explicit action each time.
• Much safer than DouBle (with regard to filesystem corruption and disk-full situations). Also, with e2compr you can choose which and how files are compressed.
• Unlike tcx, your data files can be compressed as well as your binaries.
• Despite the problems mentioned below, it is usable now (for home systems) and is relied on by many people.

Reasons you may wish not to use e2compr yet:

• Reduced speed and responsiveness (especially when compressing).
• Bugs are still being discovered, and there are numerous `fixme' comments in the code.
• Backward compatibility with older e2compr releases is not yet considered very important. (Backward compatibility is a yoke that results in kluges and reduced end product quality.) In future, command-line options may change, behaviour may change, and maybe even the file format (though it's unlikely).