* xz --force now (de)compresses files that have setuid, setgid,
The man page had it documented this way already, but the code
had a bug.
* gzip and bzip2 support in xzdiff was fixed.
* Portability fixes
* Minor fix to Czech translation
* The memory usage limit is now disabled by default.
* Added support for XZ_DEFAULTS environment variable.
* The compression settings associated with the preset levels
-0 ... -9 have been changed. --extreme was changed a little too.
* If a preset level (-0 ... -9) is specified after a custom filter
chain options have been used (e.g. --lzma2), the custom filter
chain will be forgotten. Earlier the preset options were
completely ignored after custom filter chain options had been seen.
* xz will create sparse files when decompressing if the uncompressed
data contains long sequences of binary zeros.
* Support for "xz --list" was added. Combine with --verbose or
--verbose --verbose (-vv) for detailed output.
* I had hoped that liblzma API would have been stable after
4.999.9beta, but there have been a couple of changes in the
advanced features, which don't affect most applications:
- Index handling code was revised. If you were using the old
API, you will get a compiler error (so it's easy to notice).
- A subtle but important change was made to the Block handling
API. lzma_block.version has to be initialized even for
lzma_block_header_decode(). Code that doesn't do it will work
for now, but might break in the future, which makes this API
change easy to miss.
* The major soname has been bumped to 5.0.0. liblzma API and ABI
are now stable, so the need to recompile programs linking against
liblzma shouldn't arise soon.
With gcc 3.3.3 (from NetBSD/i386 3.1) there are problems with
undefined references to LZMA_CRC32_TABLE and LZMA_CRC64_TABLE in crc32.S
and crc64_x86.S.
XZ Utils 4.999.9beta was released on 2009-08-27. Among many less
important changes, this release fixes a data corruption in the
compression code. (The bug was specific to XZ Utils and was not
present in 7-Zip or LZMA SDK.) Everyone using an older version of
XZ Utils should upgrade.
This is the last beta release before XZ Utils 5.0.0. No big changes
are planned before the first stable release.
