From: Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2010-06-30T18:39:07+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:30969] Re: [Feature #1478] Ruby archive

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 11:15 PM, Eric Hodel <drbrain@segment7.net> wrote:
> 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"

I'd like to put a vote in for simple zip files:


* They're directly supported by all impls
* They're what .jar files are (so people already using JRuby +
jars-of-rb-files would be compatible with the new format)
* They provide an index readable without decompressing the entire
archive (can't do that with tar.gz)
* Everyone on every platform can easily open zip files. Windows users
need a third-party tool to open tar.gz files.

Zip seems like the best option to me. The fact that RubyGems is
unfortunately a rather peculiar nesting of formats should not sway us
from choosing the best possible format for "ruby archives" going
forward.

- Charlie