On Mon, 2018-11-12 at 21:23 +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote: > > > > > > On Mon, 12 Nov 2018, Michał Górny wrote: > > > Also, what would be wrong with ar? It's a standard POSIX tool, and > > > should be available everywhere. > > The original post says what's wrong with ar. Please be more specific > > if you disagree with it. > > AFAICS, the arguments are that ar would be obscure, and that the LSB > considers it deprecated. I don't find either of them convincing. > Since when do we care about the LSB? >
Do you have a convincing arguments for using ar? I think it's quite obvious that tar is the only sane choice for the inner archive format since we need to preserve permissions, ownership etc. ar can't do it. Once tar is used for inner archive format, it is also a natural choice for the outer format. If you believe we should use another format, that is introduce a second distinct archive format and depend on a second tool, you need to have a good justification for it. So yes, ar is an option, as well as cpio. In both cases the format is simpler (yet obscure), and the files are smaller. But does that justify using a second tool that serves the same purpose as tar, given that tar works and we need to use it anyway? Even if we skip the fact that ar is bundled as part of binutils rather than as stand-alone archiver, we're introducing unnecessarily complexity of learning a second tool. And both ar(1) and cpio(1) have weird CLI, compared to tar(1). Plus, ar apparently doesn't support directories, so we end up adding extra complexity to get it unpacked sanely. For the record, I've did a little experiment and here are the results: -rw-r--r-- 1 mgorny mgorny 112928836 11-12 22:13 wine-any-3.20-1.gpkg.ar -rw-r--r-- 1 mgorny mgorny 112929280 11-12 22:21 wine-any-3.20-1.gpkg.cpio -rw-r--r-- 1 mgorny mgorny 112936960 11-12 22:11 wine-any-3.20-1.gpkg.tar So yes, we are saving around 8 KiB... out of 108 MiB. Of course, the savings may become relevant in case of tiny archives but do we really need to be concerned about that? The whole point of the proposal is to make the format simpler, easier to introspect and to modify. I believe limiting the number of formats in use certainly serves that purpose while starting to depend on obscure tools in order to save 8 KiB is a case of premature optimization. -- Best regards, Michał Górny
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