From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2010-05-26T13:15:15+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:30429] Re: [Feature #1478] Ruby archive

On May 22, 2010, at 09:41, Evan Phoenix wrote:
> On May 22, 2010, at 3:58 AM, Benoit Daloze wrote:
>> On 22 May 2010 01:44, Caleb Clausen <vikkous@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I'm not a big fan of .zip either, but give it its due.
>>> 
>>> Zip has the advantage that you can 'seek' to arbitrary files within
>>> the archive without needing to decompress all the other files that
>>> come before it. That's not true of gzipped tar files.....
>>> 
>>> Because each member of a zip file is a compressed separately. But this
>>> same design decision is why .tar.gz compresses better than .zip, given
>>> the same collection of files.
>>> 
>> What about LZMA (p7zip, xz) ?
> 
> I have looked into this in the past and could not find any open source libraries for reading 7z or xz files. That is the biggest reason not to use them, we don't want to start this project off writing a container format.

Does Rubinius still have the archive feature?  Does it still use my ar implementation?

RubyGems implements tar files, so it would be easy to glue together Gem::Package::TarReader/Writer and Zlib::GzipReader/Writer for a proof of concept that will work without having to figure out what is "optimal"