pigz should be able to replace gzip

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Binary package hint: pigz

Although pigz claims to be a complete replacement of gzip, it can't be used like that on a normal Ubuntu system without a lot of hackery. The reason is that the normal gzip is a dependency of lots of packages, so it can't be easily removed.

Ideally there should be a package (say, pigz-replacement) that depends on pigz, and which replaces gzip, such that its installation removes gzip but satisfies all dependencies on it. This would only add a symlink from gzip to pigz, or something like that.

(Though since gzip is by default installed in /bin and pigz in /usr/bin, there might be a bit more to it than that.)

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Feb 17 18:18:26 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: pigz 2.1.5-1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-20.57-generic
SourcePackage: pigz
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-20-generic x86_64

[TitusX (titusx)]

I tried this a while ago ... for me it works:
"sudo apt-get install pigz
sudo mv /bin/gzip /bin/gzip.dpkg-new
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/pigz /etc/alternatives/gzip
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/gzip /bin/gzip"

I think parallel decompression tools would be a quick win
for all distros. And I found this interesting link for bzip2:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Dbzip2

[eraserix (eraserix)]

Why not allow pigz et al. to be a replacement for the original tools with debian alternatives stuff (see linked debian bugreport)? The speed gain, especially if compressing, is huge.