Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives (was: silent semantic changes with reiser4)

Dave Kleikamp
2004-09-02T17:44:07Z

On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 11:11, Jamie Lokier wrote:

> Firstly, if I have to do it from a Gnome program, about the only
> program where looking in a tar file is visibly useful is Nautilus.
> Ironically, clicking on a tar file in Nautilus doesn't work, despite
> having a dependency on gnome-vfs2. :/

This should be fixed in Nautilus, not the kernel.

> Secondly, no, Gnome and MC don't support entering a container file,
> letting you make changes in it, and remembering those changes to
> _lazily_ regenerate the container file when you need it linearized,
> possibly months later or never, by some unrelated program.

Why do this in a tar file? tar = "tape archive". It isn't designed to
be a file system. Sure, it's nice to have tools that make it easier to
access files in a tar file, but to this isn't a job for the kernel.

> Thirdly, you must be referring to the Gnome versions of Bash, Make,
> GCC, coreutils and Perl which I haven't found. Perhaps we have a
> different idea of what "supports this" means :)

Please don't tell me that we have expectations to run make from within a
tar file. This is getting silly. tar does a pretty good job of
extracting files into real directories, and putting them back into an
archive. I don't see a need to teach the kernel how to deal with
compound files when user space can do it very easily.

Shaggy