On Jan 19, 2008 11:36 PM, Shawn Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I really like your "zap" package format :)
Thanks :-) > That's a nifty name, and > your reasoning behind it seems quite sound. However, I think I still > prefer repositories to host individual files as they do now instead of > big archives. Well, one snag with individual files is that you end up with very high latencies per request. If people will indulge me for a while: One of the reasons for choosing zip is that it's universally available, and has bindings to many languages. Yes, there are other compression schemes, but are they likely to installed out of the box on most machines you'll ever use? Another reason for using something that exists already is that I absolutely don't want to be forced to use specific tools to manipulate a package. I see it as a great advantage that I could open up a zap file one pretty much any box in existence and look inside. Another part of this is that simply unzipping the archive gives me the files that are runnable without installation (it may be possible to avoid having to supply software in both packaged and unpackaged formats [eg. java where you can get either SVR4 packages or self extracting executables] by structuring the files inside the archive appropriately). (The wish to have fully functional files upon simple unpacking argues against a tar file containing compressed files; it also means you can't use the mechanism on the installation media of the files being wrapped up again inside a cpio archive.) If you are after optimized operations (such as only getting that subset of the files in a package that you want) then I suspect you would actually want to talk to an IPS server and engage in a conversation with it. But I would have the server having fully populated zap files on its disk and spitting back an optimized zap file back to the client :-) -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
