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One think I dislike about tarballs is the lack of random access support.

• cpuguy83 8y ago
  You can build random access around tarballs, just need to index the header data. Shameless plug, this is what https://github.com/cpuguy83/tarfs https://github.com/cpuguy83/tarfs does. Granted, you do have to traverse the entire tarball.
  • masklinn 8y ago
    > You can build random access around tarballs, just need to index the header data. > Granted, you do have to traverse the entire tarball. So you can't randomly access a tarball, you can cache the linear access you've already done.
    • Vendan 8y ago
      You can read all the headers without reading the whole file by just seeking over the file data....
      • sitkack 8y ago
        But you would still have to decompress it. How much support for legacy systems do we need vs just making a slightly better version of a jar?
        • cpuguy83 8y ago
          Decompression has nothing to do with tar, though. But I agree, it is painful to deal with tar+gz.
          • sitkack 8y ago
            > Decompression has nothing to do with tar Which is exactly the problem. Same issue occurred via volume and filesystem management resulting in ZFS. We need systems that compose and also elide. So something that both archives as set of files and compresses them w/o losing affordances over the layer below it in the process.