Bug 12410

The recipe for pigz builds pigz. Then it boldly installs the pigz binary under the name gzip (class-target installs fine, with update-alternatives). This is done based on the pigz claim that it is a drop-in replacement for gzip. There are several problems with this:

A.
pigz is NOT a drop in replacement for gzip:

In particular:

gzip -n 
pigz -n

behave differently. You need to specify

pigz -n -T 

to have the same affect as:

gzip -n

However, calling gzip with -T results in an error.

So what do you do when you don't want any timestamsp in your compressed image?

"gzip -n" does not work (because gzip is actually pigz)
"gzip -n -T" would/could work, but this is wrong on many levels.

B. 
Great confusion:
If a recipe/class uses gzip, not clear which program is actually used:
1. Host gzip?
2. gzip-native?
3. pigz?

We need to know this in order to use correct command line arguments.


C.
An obvious fix would be to call "pigz" if we want "pigz" or "gzip" if we want "gzip". This does not work as there is no "pigz" binary. At the very least there should be pigz binary (maybe with a symlink as gzip..)


So pretending pigz is the same as gzip is not just confusing but also (in some cases) wrong.