Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar

From: Tim Kientzle (kientzle_at_acm.org)
Date: 01/15/04

  • Next message: David Schultz: "Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar" 
    Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 11:00:07 -0800
To: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG>

    David Schultz wrote:
    > On Tue, Jan 13, 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:
    >
    > Nice! I'm sure [libarchive] will be immensely useful when finished.

    It should be useful now.

    > I have a few pseudorandom comments:
    >
    > - Have you considered extending the API such that it is able to
    > efficiently support random access archive formats?

    Yes, and I've chosen not to go that way. In short, random-access
    is a different problem: tar/gzip and tar/bzip2 do not support
    random-access at all; uncompressed tar archives do not cleanly
    support updates; tape drives/stdin/stdout/sockets do not support
    random access. Random access gains you some things, loses you others.

    In short, libarchive is for "streaming archive formats."

    On the other hand, many archive formats can be handled via
    streaming: it should be possible for libarchive to read
    zip archives, for example. (However, compressed zip archives
    can't be written in a pure streaming mode.)

    > - The HTTP and FTP support in libarchive(3) seems superfluous.

    Okay, it's gone.

    > - When this is done, I'm wondering what potential impact it might
    > have on sysinstall and the archive format it uses...

    Sysinstall uses tar/gzip format, libarchive reads tar/gzip format.
    This may potentially impact the implementation of sysinstall
    (which could unpack the base system itself rather than running
    a separate tar), but I see no potential impact on sysinstall's
    choice of archive format.

    Tim

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