[IGSSTATION-7953] RINEX2 (only) .Z to .gz transition at JPL (only)

[Stowers, David A (US 3350)]

Dear colleagues,

Hope to find you well and working (in some safe capacity).
 
The IGS has been trying, for a very long time, to move away from unix compress (.Z) altogether, and there has been some motion/progress to do so.
 
While the IGS transition date remains pending (was tentatively pushed to June 1st at one point), JPL will be transitioning compression of its publicly available and pushed (to IGS GDCs) RINEX2 files from unix compression (.Z) to gzip (.gz).
 
CDDIS and SIO have indicated they will accept .gz, but will republish as .Z, so this upcoming change at JPL should only affect the few users that recognize and pickup files directly from our server. Please re-read the previous sentence.
I have received positive confirmation from most, if not all of likely affected users. This message is intended to convey this change to those I may have unintentionally missed. If so, apologies in advance.

Our intent is to implement the move to .gz,  perhaps as early as end-of-day (UT) May 18, meaning the day-before data and for a few hours after UT there may be pre-UT-change files converted to .gz  (often the raw files are only available to translate -after- the UT day boundary, as the raw files straggle in).
 
As this transition has been discussed often at IGS Infrastructure meetings and workshops, I’m hoping this is a non-issue for our direct data users, and that .gz file pattern recognition for RINEX2 is already in place.
 
Please let me know if this date (May 18) will be a problem, as we have completed testing with our backup systems and would like to move forward.

Best regards,

-dave

David Stowers,  Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech
Product Delivery Manager, Global Observing System - GNSS
Tracking Systems and Applications Section - 3350
4800 Oak Grove Drive, M/S 238-600, Pasadena, CA, USA
Tel. +1 818-354-7055, fax +1 818-393-4965, E-mail dstowers at jpl.nasa.gov