Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar

From: David Schultz (das_at_FreeBSD.ORG)
Date: 01/15/04

  • Next message: Tim Kientzle: "Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar" 
    Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:25:32 -0800
To: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>

    On Tue, Jan 13, 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:
    > Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar
    >
    > PROPOSAL
    >
    > Add "libarchive" to the tree, prepare to change the system
    > tar command to "bsdtar" once it is sufficiently stable.

    Nice! I'm sure this will be immensely useful when finished. I
    have a few pseudorandom comments:

    - Have you considered extending the API such that it is able to
      efficiently support random access archive formats? This would
      also be useful for sequential access formats such as tar(5)
      because the library could be extended to generate an in-core
      hash index for the archive on the fly, speeding up multiple
      lookups. Java's ZIP interface does this, for instance.

    - The HTTP and FTP support in libarchive(3) seems superfluous.
      Applications that need this feature can use libfetch(3) directly.
      (I realize that similar libraries such as libcomprex(3) do this,
      but that doesn't necessarily make it right.)

    - When this is done, I'm wondering what potential impact it might
      have on sysinstall and the archive format it uses... (not that I
      really want to reopen that bikeshed)
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