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

[Neil Hodgson]

> 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. File system features are
continuously changing (for the better?). 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
Windows is still standardised on .zip.

   Currently WinZip can not archive all the files on my Windows 2000 machine
because it does not understand all the file system features. With tar +
gzip, I could replace tar to handle these new features.

   For an example file that can not be archived by WinZip 8.0:

f = open("z.txt", "wt")
f.write("Hi\n")
f.close()
f = open("z.txt:a", "wt")
f.write("Ho\n")
f.close()

   which can be read:

f = open("z.txt", "rt")
print f.read()
f.close()
f = open("z.txt:a", "rt")
print f.read()
f.close()

   Neil