smaller zip-like format?

[David Garamond]

Eric wrote:
>>Yes, .tar.bz2-ing probably produces the smallest archive nowadays. But I
>>can't extract members without uncompressing the whole compressed stream.
>>Even .tar.gz and .tar.lzo are still too inefficient for my needs.
> 
> If you want to get individual files without decompressing the whole archive, 
> then you probably want to create a .tar archive which contains individually 
> compressed files.  This will have a lower compression ratio than a tar.xx 
> file, however.

CMMIW, but I think .tar is stream based itself, so you still need to 
scan from the beginning of the archive. If all the files are already 
compressed, I prefer .zip anyway since zip is more supported especially 
in Windowsland.

Well, as a last resort, if no other archive format exists, I think I 
will use zip but instead of putting in individual files, I'll put in 
tar.gz-compressed directories or groups of files. So this is a middle 
ground between a single stream (.tar.(gz|bz2)) and individual files as 
members (zip).

-- 
dave