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The simplicity of the tar format has certain advantages, such as ensuring an implementation in a variety of languages and platforms. The seperation of "group f

The simplicity of the tar format has certain advantages, such as ensuring an implementation in a variety of languages and platforms. The seperation of "group files into an archive" and "compress these bytes" can also be very useful. For example, it means I can play around with the latest and greatest compression formats without needing to wait for a version of tar that has that format built-in. Overall, I think it appeals to the "unix philosophy" - composing two independent tools (tar and gzip) instead of having one integrated solution. The "tape drive" part is legacy cruft, certainly, but in practice its removal doesn't improve things enough that people find it worth the compatability break. I'm not going to claim this is better than the more modern feature-rich archive formats, but hopefully this helps you understand the other side of the argument a little better.

lifthrasiir 6y ago
> Overall, I think it appeals to the "unix philosophy" - composing two independent tools (tar and gzip) instead of having one integrated solution. The unix philosophy in this case breaks down when you need to access individual files. One possible "unixy" solution would be .gz.tar as opposed to .tar.gz, but it is not universally supported as .tar.gz is.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  You can have the first file in the tar archive as the "index" file
pornel 6y ago
There's no simplicity in tar. Even reading the file size is a guesswork. It's a baroque format with weird short-sighted decisions patched and extended in ad-hoc ways by multiple subtly incompatible implementations.
- klodolph 6y ago
  Unless you're using PaX, isn't the file size just a fixed-size field in the header? Is there something I'm missing?
  - Hello71 6y ago
    fixed... ish... with two sizes and two formats: https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/portability-of-tar-features.html#large-file-sizes https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/portability-of-tar-f...
pdw 6y ago
It's unix philosophy alright, but it's the other unix philosophy -- worse is better. tar has a poorly designed base format with lots of incompatible extensions, but for most people most of the time it works fine. So why change?
- fomine3 6y ago
  Is tar "worse" in the context?

lifthrasiir 6y ago

> Overall, I think it appeals to the "unix philosophy" - composing two independent tools (tar and gzip) instead of having one integrated solution. The unix philosophy in this case breaks down when you need to access individual files. One possible "unixy" solution would be .gz.tar as opposed to .tar.gz, but it is not universally supported as .tar.gz is.

heavenlyblue 6y ago
You can have the first file in the tar archive as the "index" file

pornel 6y ago

There's no simplicity in tar. Even reading the file size is a guesswork. It's a baroque format with weird short-sighted decisions patched and extended in ad-hoc ways by multiple subtly incompatible implementations.

klodolph 6y ago
Unless you're using PaX, isn't the file size just a fixed-size field in the header? Is there something I'm missing?
- Hello71 6y ago
  fixed... ish... with two sizes and two formats: https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/portability-of-tar-features.html#large-file-sizes https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/portability-of-tar-f...

pdw 6y ago

It's unix philosophy alright, but it's the other unix philosophy -- worse is better. tar has a poorly designed base format with lots of incompatible extensions, but for most people most of the time it works fine. So why change?

fomine3 6y ago
Is tar "worse" in the context?