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> 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
by electroly 10mo 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 10mo 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?