Issue 34969: Add --fast, --best to the gzip CLI

the gzip module has a CLI but this one does not allow to specify the compression method (slow, fast)

Hi Stéphane thanks for the proposal and the PR.

But are those options usefull in real life? (I may be biased as a Linux user).

I see this gzip CLI usefull to decompress a gzip file on platforms not having a gzip program installed, but I don't think it's usefull to compress. (Yet I'm OK with the current status-quo: If we allow to decompress, let's allow to compress, for consistency).

But why drifting from "let's allow to compress just for consistency" to "let's replace the gzip command"?

I mean, except is it's usefull in some cases that I don't see.

Also so does it mean we'll have to add the 16 other gzip options at the end?

Hi, on platform without gzip ( there are some , including some widely used OS  eg: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker/issues/507 )
ability to use python gzip cli is extremely usefull as a fallback.

Though as discussed on irc default compression to 6 is a good tradeoff for the basic options fast (-1) / best(-9) and require less memory for decompression on target (could be embedded).

Julien,

Currently, the default compresslevel for gzip.open, GzipFile is 9, for the best method compression. Maybe we could define 6 as the tradeoff and specify 1 (for fast), 9 (for best), 6 (tradeoff).

Maybe in an other issue?

I'm not sure those options are such useful. If you want to control more details, it is not hard to write a tiny Python script. Python is a programming language on the whole.

But if I add options for controlling the compression level, I would add options -1 ... -9. I never used verbose forms --fast and --best.

> But if I add options for controlling the compression level, I would add options -1 ... -9. I never used verbose forms --fast and --best.

If we add options, I would prefer to only add --fast and --best which are easy to understand. I really have no idea of the difference between -3 and -4 for example. In practice, I don't think that anyone uses these -N options on the common line.

To be honest, I never passed any option to gzip: I always use "gzip file" to get "file.gz". I don't really care of it's file. I just hope that it's smaller :-)

But I'm not against add --best and --fast. By the way, on Linux, gzip default compression level is 6 whereas Python uses 9 by default. I agree to make Python more consistent with Unix tools. In that case, again, it makes sense to add an option to get again --best (level 9).

If we add this options to the gzip CLI, I would suggest to add them to bzip2 and lzma CLI in the same PR. And maybe open separate issues for the zipfile and tarfile CLI,

man lzma:

       --fast
       --best These are somewhat misleading aliases for  -0  and  -9,  respec‐
              tively.   These  are  provided  only for backwards compatibility
              with LZMA Utils.  Avoid using these options.

man bzip2:

       -1 (or --fast) to -9 (or --best)
              Set  the  block size to 100 k, 200 k ..  900 k when compressing.
              Has no effect when decompressing.  See MEMORY MANAGEMENT  below.
              The --fast and --best aliases are primarily for GNU gzip compat‐
              ibility.  In particular, --fast  doesn't  make  things  signifi‐
              cantly faster.  And --best merely selects the default behaviour.

Hi @Serhiy

I would like to add them on lzma, bz2, zipfile and tarfile.

New changeset 3e28eed9ec2249bb11ad0db4629271b7ce9b7918 by Julien Palard (Stéphane Wirtel) in branch 'master':
bpo-34969: Add --fast, --best on the gzip CLI (GH-9833)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/3e28eed9ec2249bb11ad0db4629271b7ce9b7918

stage: patch review -> (no value)