On 09/09/2009 08:32 PM, Ville Skyttä wrote:
On Wednesday 09 September 2009, Florian Festi wrote:
Having a look at the tar formats I do not belief that switching to tar
is a real option. The format is just horrible (GNU tar needs over 200
lines to read an integer out of a header field) and full of hacks to
remain backward compatible (header in header + extentions). This would
be all not that bad if there where a nice little library we could link
against...
libtar doesn't qualify? http://www.feep.net/libtar/
Not that I know anything about it, but it might at least satisfy "little".
It didn't look very trust worthy when visiting the page some days ago.
Having a look at the ML archive now I am quite sure that it doesn't
qualify. A library would need to be under active maintenance and have a
chance to be still around in 5 or 10 years. GNU tar e.g. would, but they
don't offer a library...
Anyway, thanks for having a look. If there is a great library or archive
format that should e considered feel free to bring it up.
I just had a look at the XAR format (used by rpm5) but development also
already has slowed down while some issues are still open (like creating
the promissed DTD). It also has the disadvantage of pulling in a long
tail of dependencies.
In general I thing a format without an index and without internal
compression (as cpio or tar) fits the RPM use case better than formats
with an file index at the end or the beginning that use by file compression.
As we typically package lots of small files I expect the compression
rate to significantly drop when switching to by file compression. But I
cannot back that up with real data right now.
Florian
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