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One needs to give it more than a superficial glance. ZOO was designed to be randomly accessible, with the directory headers forming a linked list. It actually
by JdeBP 8y ago
One needs to give it more than a superficial glance. ZOO was designed to be randomly accessible, with the directory headers forming a linked list. It actually has an uncompressed index and can take advantage of seekable files. It also supports both long and short filenames; CRCs of the metadata structures (c.f. the recent kerfuffle about xz); and an extensible, versioned, header mechanism that not only could be extended but actually already once was extended to add the long filename support amongst other things.
- cyphar 8y agoIs there an actual paper or some high-level summary of the format -- not to mention a modern implementation? The only summary I could find was the one on Wikipedia. I also found the source code of "unzoo" but it's a bit difficult to understand the benefits of a file format if I first have to understand its implementation. I didn't take a superficial glance out of laziness, it's because I couldn't find any more information about it. But I think you also missed that I mentioned that the style of versioning implemented in ZOO (as far as I can tell based on a Wikipedia page) is not the correct style for snapshot-like versioning.