Re: Standard OS X Compression format
Re: Standard OS X Compression format
- Subject: Re: Standard OS X Compression format
- From: Scott Anguish <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 06:45:56 -0500
Again.. the problem with this is that tar is designed as a sequential
access format.
If you want to extract a single file, you must go through the entire
archive till you get to that file... and you can't get a simple list
without traversing it either.. now, add the gzip on top of that.. and
it's a bunch of overhead.
the xpak format was designed with expandability in mind, and with
support for mac stuff, as well as unix stuff (and other.. it's really
open ended)... and to be able to allow users of the format quick access
to file listings without overhead, and to be able to decompress and
extract a single file without any severe penalties regardless of it's
location in the archive.
http://www.stepwise.com/Software/xpak
has the speck.. there are a couple of new people interested in helping
out now... although I've not had time to dig up what is needed to help
them quite yet.. hopefully this weekend.
The format is solid.. ready to go.. it's had about a year of discussion,
comments, additions, etc... we need someone who can write the base
implementation.
(I'm just too swamped to do it)
On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 12:05 PM, Andrew J. Hobbs wrote:
<asbestos_underwear>
Rather than a new "standard", going with something like tar.gz would be
much preferable. True, it doesn't understand resource forks, but
preferred mode for OS X is resource in data fork of a seperate file.
Perhaps modifying (and providing patches back) to the existing
utilities to gracefully handle forks.
Something like this:
Bundle files into the tar the same as if OS X was sticking files onto a
UFS or foreign NFS drive, by putting resources in an external file.
When decoding, automatically reassemble if the filesystem supports
forks, or leave in the accepted format on others.
Standards are a good thing taken in moderation. I'd rather see an
existing, living standard extended (with feeds back to the standard),
than YACS (Yet Another Custom Standard).
</asbestos_underwear>