Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 14:19:27 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> Cc: Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk>, arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Package system flaws? Message-ID: <3D2A01DF.EF997A91@mindspring.com> References: <200207081441.g68Ef3fr063247@dotar.thuvia.org> <200207081912.g68JCHMi032743@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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Garrett Wollman wrote: > <<On Mon, 8 Jul 2002 15:41:03 +0100 (BST), Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> said: > > What advantage is there in storing the metadata as extended pax(1) headers > > instead of as the first file(s) in the archive? > > For one, representing files specific to a variant or option. > > You could also have one that meant `the contents of this member file are > compressed', or one that meant `the contents of this member file are > another archive'. Perhaps both at the same time. THis is very important. Specifically, another of the main problems, besides no "metadata first" priority, of the tgz format is that the index should be uncompressed while the contents are compressed. Historically, the whole archive, metadata and all, was compressed in order to support seperate uncompress and tar. But it makes just as much sense to support seperate tar and uncompress -- i.e. compress the individual files, rather than compressing all files plus the metadata. Most compression will work better on individual files rather than random file contents because of dictionary locality, anyway. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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