[EMAIL PROTECTED] ( Marc) (A.) (Lehmann ) wrote:
Well, ar's limitations with respect to name length etc. are in practise
not every severe (nobody will have 10000 character file names (the ar
limit), and even antique ar implemnentations will support up to 255
characters).
Technically I don't know if that's true. From my ar man page:
GNU ar can maintain archives whose members have names of
any length; however, depending on how ar is configured on
your system, a limit on member-name length may be imposed
(for compatibility with archive formats maintained with
other tools). If it exists, the limit is often 15 charac-
ters (typical of formats related to a.out) or 16 charac-
ters (typical of formats related to coff).
But, that is of no consequence -- we wouldn't need to keep
meaningful names, we just need unique resource ids that the XML
structure can refer to... these could quite simply be numbers
counting up from zero, or hash strings. In either case just
15 characters could be fine.
I am not opposed to uncompressed jar files, but compression is certainly a
bad idea (the jar compression algorithm is rather ineffective)
I like the idea of ar files. Compression then happens by
[un]{b,g}zipping the ar via a compression plugin in the usual
GIMP style.
HOWEVER, this might be a good time to think about whether we'd
prefer a compressed format that we can random-access de/compress
on the fly instead of going via a huge (and with image data we
can easily be talking HUGE) temporary intermediate file. In
this case something like a ZIP (or okay, equivilently, a compressed
jar, whatever you want to call it) is a better (and still
exceedingly standard in its most basic form) choice of
wrapper for the hierarchy-file-plus-linked-resources.
--Adam
--
Adam D. Moss . ,,^^ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.foxbox.org/ co:3
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