At 05:58 PM 2/8/2001 +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote: >On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 12:41:34PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > > At 05:39 PM 2/8/2001 +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote: > > > >Do we really want to use tar format (over say cpio) as tar rounds files > > >up to 512 block boundaries, and has some arbitrary restrictions on > filename > > >lengths in the headers? > > > > Having the perl archives splittable by other available tools is a good > > thing. Using the zip format's fine too--I don't much care either way. > >Yes, I agree. Hence cpio may not be great as tools to deal with it >are much rarer Yup, and finding them on non-unix platforms can be rather tricky, too. Zip and tar are probably the two biggies. >\zip's better in that it allows easy random access to a compressed file, >[without having to compress everything else first] but worse for the >same reason because you don't get as good a compression ratio by >compressing each file separately. I've seen it go both ways with compression, but I'm not sure that a few percent either way's a big deal. Packaging is more important than compression for this purpose anyway, I think. Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunkThread Previous | Thread Next