Libarchive 2.7.0 Released

[Tim Kientzle]

I'm pleased to announce that libarchive 2.7.0 is now ready for general
use.
It can be downloaded from the libarchive project site:
http://libarchive.googlecode.com/

The major new features include:
* Works on Windows. All software and test suites have been verified
under both Visual Studio and Cygwin. There have also been significant
improvements to platform-specific support on FreeBSD, AIX, Tru64,
Interix, and GNU Hurd.
* Cmake support. In addition to the autoconf-based build system that
is so convenient for command-line Unix folks, we now have a cmake-
based build system that should make it easy for people to use
libarchive with Visual Studio, Xcode, KDevelop and other IDEs.
* First-class support for lzma and xz reading and writing, using the
newly-released liblzma libraries.
* Command-line fallback for most decompression. If you build
libarchive without zlib, bzlib, or liblzma, libarchive will still
recognize the corresponding compression formats and attempt to run
gunzip, bunzip2, unlzma, or unxz utilities. This is noticably slower
but should simplify some awkward distribution issues.
* New archive_read_disk API hides platform-specific knowledge about
reading metadata from disk.
* Improvements to mtree writing, ISO reading, extended attribute
support.
* Distribution now includes documentation in PDF, HTML, and plain
text formats.
* Notable test improvements.
* Wiki documentation on libarchive.googlecode.com has been greatly
extended with full copies of the manpages and new articles on
libarchive internals and usage, including detailed tutorials on adding
new read filters and test cases.

Work has already begun on libarchive 2.8, which I hope will be
released this fall. If you have specific feature requests, please let
us know. If you have spare time during your summer vacation and are
looking for a challenge, take a look at our Wish List in the
libarchive.googlecode.com wiki.

I want to especially acknowledge the contributions of Michihiro
NAKAJIMA, who started contributing to this project just a few months
ago but has already transformed the entire system: Among other
things, he did a lot of work to get all of the test suites to build
and pass on Windows.

Tim Kientzle
Oakland, California

Libarchive project home: http://libarchive.googlecode.com/
2.7.0 release: http://libarchive.googlecode.com/files/libarchive-2.7.0.tar.gz
Bugs and feature requests: http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/issues/list
Online documentation: http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/w/list