why tar is strange (was: The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..)

[Grant Griffin]

Neil Hodgson wrote:
> 
> > But to go back to tarring and feathering tar, the user has little need
> > for packaging without compression, so packaging and compression
> > constitute a single gizmo from the modern user's perspective.  QED
> 
>    Separating the functionality is more flexible.

But flexibility is often at the opposite end of the spectrum from
ease-of-use (or at least ease-of-learning).  So I guess it's mainly a
matter of what your values are.

> File system features are
> continuously changing (for the better?).

Heck, not much of _anything_ ever changes in Windows: it evolves at the
rate of a sea urchin!  (Only DOS evolved slower.  Then again, hasn't
Unix been with us since the '70s? ;-)

> You may want to produce archives of
> files that use newer features such as Unicode file names or multiple forks
> now. In the past long file names were a problem for a while. By separating
> the two components each may evolve independently. It looks to me that *x
> users are seeing better compression more quickly in the form of .bz2 while

I don't know what the compression ratios are between the best currently
available and zip, but if the new methods aren't, say, 25% or more
better than old ones (for large files!), I'll stick with the old ones,
thanks.  (Sure, achieving the greatest possible compression is a neat
party trick, but otherwise small differences don't matter.)

> Windows is still standardised on .zip.

Again, I would humbly suggest that this is an advantage.  Obviously
there's a tradeoff between "the latest and the greatest" versus
"standardization"; I prefer the latter.

it's-not-a-coincidence-that-windows-users-are-windows-users-and
   -linux-users-are-linux-users,-but-isn't-it-nice-that-we-both
   -can-be-python-users?-<wink>-ly y'rs,

=g2
-- 
_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
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