[ANN] Squashfs 3.3 released

[Phillip Lougher <phillip@lougher.demon.co.uk>]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce another release of Squashfs.  This is the 22nd
release in just over five years.  Squashfs 3.3 has lots of nice improvements,
both to the filesystem itself (bigger blocks and sparse files), but
also to the Squashfs-tools Mksquashfs and Unsquashfs.

The next stage after this release is to fix the one remaining blocking issue
(filesystem endianness), and then try to get Squashfs mainlined into the
Linux kernel again.

The list of changes from the change-log are as follows:

1. Filesystem improvements:

   1.1. Maximum block size has been increased to 1Mbyte, and the
        default block size has been increased to 128 Kbytes.
        This improves compression.

   1.2. Sparse files are now supported.  Sparse files are files
        which have large areas of unallocated data commonly called
        holes.  These files are now detected by Squashfs and stored
        more efficiently.  This improves compression and read
        performance for sparse files.

2. Mksquashfs improvements:

   2.1.  Exclude files have been extended to use wildcard pattern
         matching and regular expressions.  Support has also been
         added for non-anchored excludes, which means it is
         now possible to specify excludes which match anywhere
         in the filesystem (i.e. leaf files), rather than always
         having to specify exclude files starting from the root
         directory (anchored excludes).

   2.2.  Recovery files are now created when appending to existing
         Squashfs filesystems.  This allows the original filesystem
         to be recovered if Mksquashfs aborts unexpectedly
         (i.e. power failure).

3. Unsquashfs improvements:

    3.1. Multiple extract files can now be specified on the
         command line, and the files/directories to be extracted can
         now also be given in a file.

    3.2. Extract files have been extended to use wildcard pattern
         matching and regular expressions.

    3.3. Filename printing has been enhanced and Unquashfs can
         now display filenames with file attributes
         ('ls -l' style output).

    3.4. A -stat option has been added which displays the filesystem
         superblock information.

    3.5. Unsquashfs now supports 1.x filesystems.

4. Miscellaneous improvements/bug fixes:

   4.1. Squashfs kernel code improved to use SetPageError in
        squashfs_readpage() if I/O error occurs.

   4.2. Fixed Squashfs kernel code bug preventing file
        seeking beyond 2GB.

   4.3. Mksquashfs now detects file size changes between
        first phase directory scan and second phase filesystem create.

Regards

Phillip Lougher
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