Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar

[David Schultz]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> Request for Comments:  libarchive, bsdtar
> 
> PROPOSAL
> 
> Add "libarchive" to the tree, prepare to change the system
> tar command to "bsdtar" once it is sufficiently stable.

Nice!  I'm sure this will be immensely useful when finished.  I
have a few pseudorandom comments:

- Have you considered extending the API such that it is able to
  efficiently support random access archive formats?  This would
  also be useful for sequential access formats such as tar(5)
  because the library could be extended to generate an in-core
  hash index for the archive on the fly, speeding up multiple
  lookups.  Java's ZIP interface does this, for instance.

- The HTTP and FTP support in libarchive(3) seems superfluous.
  Applications that need this feature can use libfetch(3) directly.
  (I realize that similar libraries such as libcomprex(3) do this,
  but that doesn't necessarily make it right.)

- When this is done, I'm wondering what potential impact it might
  have on sysinstall and the archive format it uses... (not that I
  really want to reopen that bikeshed)