> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of David Coallier > Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 4:05 PM > To: Andi Gutmans > Cc: Gregory Beaver; PHP Developers Mailing List > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHAR was PHP 5.3 Suggested Feature List > > Andi, if there was to be a cross platform tool to view, extract, add, > etc with phar archives, would that influence your choice ?
Well the point is that if you're using tar, zip (jar) or some other standard file format you have thousands of tools that you can use. The format is really mainly an implementation detail (maybe with some minor semantics) so I think it's better for PHP to embrace an existing one than coming up with its own. This is also why Java took this approach. I realize there is some history to this implementation but I think tweaking the file format part of the implementation isn't a large amount of work and worthwhile in the long run esp. as phar hasn't been widely adopted at this point (and probably won't be for Web apps but rather installations and administration solutions). Andi
