SquashFS is a highly compressed, read-only file system often used as a root file system on embedded devices, live systems, or simply as a compressed archive format. This project originally started out as a fork of squashfs-tools 4.3, after encountering some short comings and realizing that there have been no updates on the SourceForge site or mailing list for a long time. Even before the first public release, the fork was replaced with a complete re-write after growing frustrated with the existing code base. The utilities provided by squashfs-tools-ng offer alternative tooling and are intentionally named differently, so both packages can be installed side by side. The actual guts of squashfs-tools-ng are encapsulated in a library with a generic API designed to make SquashFS available to other applications as an embeddable, extensible archive format (or simply to read, write, or manipulate SquashFS file systems).