for the wish list: support for reading LZM and LZMA compressed formats

[Theodore Kilgore]

Specifically:

Slax and perhaps some other live distros are using LZM-compressed files 
along with squashfs, and are mounting them as loop devices during the boot 
process. It would be really nice to be able to read the contents through 
MC.

Also, it seems that Slackware (in slackware-current) has just made a move 
from the old, time-honored tgz format to a new format which is called 
"txz" and the ChangeLog says:
--------------------------------------------
Fri May  8 18:49:03 CDT 2009
   Hello folks!  This batch of updates includes the newly released KDE 
4.2.3,
   but more noticeably it marks the first departure from the use of gzip 
for
   compressing Slackware packages.  Instead, we will be using xz, based on
   the LZMA compression algorithm.  xz offers better compression than even
   bzip2, but still offers good extraction performance (about 3 times 
better
   than bzip2 and not much slower than gzip in our testing).  Since support
   for bzip2 has long been requested, support for bzip2 and the original 
lzma
   format has also been added (why not?), but this is purely in the 
interest
   of completeness -- we think most people will probably want to use either
   the original .tgz or the new .txz compression wrappers.  The actual
   Slackware package format (which consists of the layout within the 
package
   envelope) has not changed, but this is the first support within 
Slackware's
   package tools for using alternate compression algorithms.
---------------------------------------

I would be glad to help, to the best of my ability. However, I have tried 
to look into the existing code for things like tar.gz support and I can 
not quite grasp how it has been done. Too much C for doing hardware 
support and not enough C++ for doing application stuff is no doubt the 
problem on my part. Thus, I could in practical terms probably not be of 
much use in the project. If anyone knows more about how to do this kind of 
thing and thinks I can help anyway, please let me know. I really would 
like to see it get done.

Theodore Kilgore