why gzip is essential package in Debian

[sathiya]

Hi,

I came to know that, gzip is the only compression which being a essential package in Debian.. Why it is so, when no other compression program reached that state.

How this is different from other ? How it is selected to be an essential package ? I know some reasons, but i believe there should be some strong reasons, mentioned in some documentation explaining it ? is it ? if yes where it is ?

Or do you have some idea about it ?

[GNU-Fan]

I think tar is mandatory as well.
Together they form the Dynamic Duo.
.tar.gz is something that has a very widespred usage in the whole Free Software community. I think you will have a hard time to find more than three Upstreams that don't offer sources in tar.gz or .bz2

Not to mention the fact that Debian's apt system depends on gzip itself.

[coopstah13]

initrd is also compressed with gzip these days, and since initrd is used by kernel, it is quite essential

[hazel]

There's probably a historic reason too: gzip is older than bzip2.

[sathiya]

I dont believe so, because we unixisian's does not accept something blindly because it is older ..

I found, and one of the primary reason is gzip does its job fairly well than others. Such as doing a good amount compression in reasonable amount of time.