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Author wchargin
Recipients wchargin
Date 2020-01-19.20:23:57
SpamBayes Score -1.0
Marked as misclassified Yes
Message-id <1579465438.04.0.91237843457.issue39389@roundup.psfhosted.org>
In-reply-to
Content
The `gzip` module properly uses the user-specified compression level to
control the underlying zlib stream compression level, but always writes
metadata that indicates that the maximum compression level was used.

Repro:

```
import gzip

blob = b"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." * 32

with gzip.GzipFile("fast.gz", mode="wb", compresslevel=1) as outfile:
    outfile.write(blob)

with gzip.GzipFile("best.gz", mode="wb", compresslevel=9) as outfile:
    outfile.write(blob)
```

Run this script, then run `wc -c *.gz` and `file *.gz`:

```
$ wc -c *.gz
 82 best.gz
 84 fast.gz
166 total
$ file *.gz
best.gz: gzip compressed data, was "best", last modified: Sun Jan 19 20:15:23 2020, max compression
fast.gz: gzip compressed data, was "fast", last modified: Sun Jan 19 20:15:23 2020, max compression
```

The file sizes correctly reflect the difference, but `file` thinks that
both archives are written at max compression.

The error is that the ninth byte of the header in the output stream is
hard-coded to `\002` at Lib/gzip.py:260 (as of 558f07891170), which
indicates maximum compression. The correct value to indicate maximum
speed is `\004`. See RFC 1952, section 2.3.1:
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1952>

Using GNU `gzip(1)` with `--fast` creates the same output file as the
one emitted by the `gzip` module, except for two bytes: the metadata and
the OS (the ninth and tenth bytes).
History
Date User Action Args
2020-01-19 20:23:58wcharginsetrecipients: + wchargin
2020-01-19 20:23:58wcharginsetmessageid: <1579465438.04.0.91237843457.issue39389@roundup.psfhosted.org>
2020-01-19 20:23:57wcharginlinkissue39389 messages
2020-01-19 20:23:57wchargincreate