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This seems like a tension between the needs of genuine archival storage, and packaging of multi-file artifacts for web distribution. The latter use case dominat
by closeparen 6y ago
This seems like a tension between the needs of genuine archival storage, and packaging of multi-file artifacts for web distribution. The latter use case dominates in the “archives” I actually encounter.
- klodolph 6y agoYou can create multiple formats and expect your users to understand the differences and select the correct one, but the 99% use case is non-technical users--so 99% of us are going to choose the default option. A bit of redundancy (a short signature and copy of file metadata) is a clear win here, at least for popular formats like Zip. In order for a format to BE the default option for non-technical users, it has to be reasonably good for most use cases, rather than optimized for one specific use case. If you are writing a package manager or backup program you might make a different choice, but how often do you find yourself writing a package manager?