From: Ned Konz <ned@...>
Date: 2001-11-01T02:13:07+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23986] Re: RubyGems Discussion

On Wednesday 31 October 2001 08:22 am, Ned Konz wrote:
> On Wednesday 31 October 2001 07:56 am, Robert Feldt wrote:
> > Ok, but how can this be used with Ryan's scheme with metadata? Is there
> > some way you can attach info to zip archive which winzip et al will not
> > look at?
>
> Who cares if winzip looks at it? I'd use, say, the first file, uncompressed
> for metadata. This makes it easy to find (scan forward to the first member
> header tag, read the header, and you're at the data).

Oh yeah, of course you can also put arbitrary stuff at the beginning of a zip 
archive, since they have the index at the end. This is how self-extracting 
zips work. Roughly you could do:

Ruby program
__END__
member (signature, header, data)
member (signature, header,data)
..
index (signature, data)

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned@bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com