Support for lzip?

[jskeet]

LZIP is an LZMA-based stream format, used in conjunction with things like tar for archives.
(My own interest is in the IANA time zone distribution; a new format uses LZIP.)

I've looked at the LZMA support in SharpCompress and I don't think I can just use it out of the box - mostly due to how the dictionary size is specified. It's entirely possible that I've missed something, however.

The file format is documented here.

I'd be happy to start working on a pull request if this sounds like something you'd welcome - but I'll wait for confirmation that it's actually sensible before doing so.

(I'm not sure whether it would be easy to write an lzip compressor - that's not something I personally need. I quite understand if you'd rather not support decompression without compression though.)

[adamhathcock]

This is definitely something to include if you need it..

Looks like you'll need a LZipReader as it's a forward-only format. It does look like you'll need to make something custom for the compression using LZMA as a base. I'm not an expert in this stuff so I'm not sure how much help I'll be if you can't get it working :)

It's fine just to do the decompression. I can probably backfill a compressor if there's demand based on what you create.

Thanks!

[jskeet]

Righto. Will prototype something in order to get any idea of whether it's even feasible without actually understanding the compression deeply. If that goes well, I'll start working it into a proper PR. Thanks for the quick response :)