234601 - RFE: Have (a) pleasant component(s)/interface(s) for gzip stream/file compression and decompression.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[Justin Turner Arthur]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

There are currently no documented components/interfaces for XPCOM application
developers to use for the comprehensive manipulation of gzip streams or files.
This could be implemented in nsIStreamConverter, which allready has support for
decompressing a gzip stream asynchroniously, but does not have support for
synchronious stream conversion for gzip streams, nor does it provide gzip
compression at all. For application developers wishing to mainly deal with local
files, adding gzip capability to nsIZipReader would be convenient, and an
nsIZipWriter could be developed for creating a gzip file. We may want to name
nsIZip* to nsICompressedFile* or something of that sort if more formats are to
be supported.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Justin Turner Arthur]

A slight clarification: while nsIStreamConverter does indeed support synchronous
stream conversion, the gzip to uncompressed convertor that is utilized does not.

Comment 2

[Justin Turner Arthur]

Switching component field from XPCOM to Networking upon suggestion.
nsIStreamConverter lies in Necko and seems to be the best focus for any
development concerning the fulfillment this RFE at the moment.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Imo the way to do this is to implement the sync conversion stuff on the gzip
decompression converter and to write a parallel gzip compression converter.

Comment 4

[Eyal Rozenberg]

Is this WONTFIXed because of the move away from XPCOM or because of lack of activity? 

In case it's the latter - note that support for compressed mail folders remains open...

Comment 5

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

more the latter. If someone has a patch, we'll consider it in good faith.. but feature requests that are 10 years old with no activity and aren't core gecko features are just clogging up the system and are already defacto wontfix