libraries/zfec: Added (fast erasure codec)

1 files changed, 25 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/libraries/zfec/README b/libraries/zfec/README
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..93f3d9a02b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/libraries/zfec/README
@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+This package implements an "erasure code", or "forward error correction code".
+
+You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or,
+at your option, any later version. You may use this package under the
+Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.0. (You may choose to use
+this package under the terms of either licence, at your option.) See the file
+COPYING.GPL for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. See
+the file COPYING.TGPPL.html for the terms of the Transitive Grace Period
+Public Licence, version 1.0.
+
+The most widely known example of an erasure code is the RAID-5 algorithm which
+makes it so that in the event of the loss of any one hard drive, the stored
+data can be completely recovered. The algorithm in the zfec package has a
+similar effect, but instead of recovering from the loss of only a single
+element, it can be parameterized to choose in advance the number of elements
+whose loss it can tolerate.
+
+This package is largely based on the old "fec" library by Luigi Rizzo et al.,
+which is a mature and optimized implementation of erasure coding. The zfec
+package makes several changes from the original "fec" package, including
+addition of the Python API, refactoring of the C API to support zero-copy
+operation, a few clean-ups and optimizations of the core code itself, and the
+addition of a command-line tool named "zfec".
+
+This package requires pysetuptools, pyutil and darcsver.