From: Chris Grindstaff <chrisg@...>
Date: 2001-11-01T01:25:43+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23981] Re: RubyGems Discussion


Wednesday, October 31, 2001, 10:56:16 AM, Robert Feldt wrote:
RF> On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Ned Konz wrote:

>> On Wednesday 31 October 2001 07:35 am, Robert Feldt wrote:
>> > If its done on a per-file basis I would again like to propose LZO as in
>> > the CompressionR extension. It should be faster than zlib at
>> > decompression even though slightly worse compression ratio.
>> 
>> The problem with this is that you lose compatibility with existing archiving 
>> tools.
>> 
>> I'd recommend going with, say, Zip so that even if something in the RubyGem 
>> system breaks you can still manually install it (if possible).
>> 
>> Many people, for instance, use WinZip to view/operate on .jar files.
>> 
RF> Ok, but how can this be used with Ryan's scheme with metadata? Is there
RF> some way you can attach info to zip archive which winzip et al will not
RF> look at?

Sun handles this in Jars by using a "magic value".  Each jar contains
a directory named "meta-inf" which contains a file named
"manifest.mf". This file and really the entire directory contain metadata.

For more info:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/jar/

[snip]

Chris
-- 
Chris Grindstaff
chrisg@appliedReasoning.com  |  www.appliedReasoning.com