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Wasn't there first 'ar' as a general purpose archiver and later 'tar', "tape archiver"? Why do you find it surprising that the archive format from that time wa
by sureglymop 11mo ago
Wasn't there first 'ar' as a general purpose archiver and later 'tar', "tape archiver"?
Why do you find it surprising that the archive format from that time was used to archive a bunch of files?
I wasn't alive but I'm pretty sure ar wasn't only used for this purpose in unix.
- Joker_vD 11mo agoBecause e.g. a.out didn't survive and was replaced? Several times, even?
- sureglymop 11mo agoThat is a good point. Although I can only guess, it intuitively makes sense to me why the executable format would more quickly evolve than the archive format which "just works" still.
- electroly 11mo ago> Why do you find it surprising that the archive format from that time was used to archive a bunch of files? It's surprising because we still use it today, not because it was used at the time.
- 1718627440 11mo agoWhy would we break backwards compatibility, when it works just fine?
- electroly 10mo agoThis response answers too much--why did we invent and adopt tar for all other use cases, then? Why do we not still use ar for its original general archiving purpose in any other situation but this one? Obviously there is some reason! I'm curious what that reason is. You can make regular archives with ar today but we don't--"it still works" wasn't good enough reason for any other archive use case. What are the general archiving requirements that don't exist for object archives that meant ar is still fine for this one use case?
- 1718627440 10mo agoBecause we care about metadata and robustness for data files, but don't for some automatically generated artifacts that are consumed by the next program anyways? What do you need your static archives to have, that ar doesn't provide?