On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 12:41:34PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> At 05:39 PM 2/8/2001 +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> >Do we really want to use tar format (over say cpio) as tar rounds files
> >up to 512 block boundaries, and has some arbitrary restrictions on filename
> >lengths in the headers?
>
> Having the perl archives splittable by other available tools is a good
> thing. Using the zip format's fine too--I don't much care either way.
Yes, I agree. Hence cpio may not be great as tools to deal with it
are much rarer
> (Zip's better in some ways since you can encode extra info in the file
> headers, but I don't know that we'll need it, nor if any platform besides
> VMS uses it)
Acorn RISC OS zip tools use the extra info to store file metadata.
I think that the unix zip tools use the extra info field to store
create/access/modification times. There's a tagging format defined,
so a file can have multiple blocks of data in the extra info field
that programs that don't understand them treat as opaque.
zip's better in that it allows easy random access to a compressed file,
[without having to compress everything else first] but worse for the
same reason because you don't get as good a compression ratio by
compressing each file separately.
Nicholas Clark
