smaller zip-like format?

[David Garamond]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 00:13, David Garamond wrote:
> 
>>Does anyone know of an open format for compressed archive like zip, but 
>>with greater compression ratio for lots of small (1K-4K) files, while 
>>still maintaining relative ease for extracting member files from the 
>>archive? I'm looking for something like Microsoft's CHM format. Python 
>>binding is not a must, I'll probably write the binding if it doesn't exist.
> 
> A tar archive compressed with bzip2, perhaps?  I haven't tested them,
> but .tar.gz seems to consistently come out better than zip, and bzip2 is
> consistently better than gzip.  And there's Python bindings!

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.

-- 
dave