Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives

David Masover
2004-09-03T00:25:32Z

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Dave Kleikamp wrote:
[...]
| 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.

Suppose I've got a tar file with an index attached. Suppose it's
something like /usr/src/linux. Am I expected to extract all code for
all architectures, with all drivers, all docs, etc? Now, yes -- or I
have to figure out exactly which ones I need before I extract them
manually, one by one.

But with tar support for make (and so on), files can be extracted on
demand. It's possible to do this in userspace, with named pipes, but
that's much slower and insanely clumsy.

This has further implications -- imagine a desktop, binary distro
shipped with all files except the very most basic stuff as package
archives. They can all be extracted, on demand -- the first time I run
OpenOffice.org, it's installed. If there needs to be post-installation,
that's handled by the .deb plugin (or whatever).

I don't know offhand how big OOo is. I think it's something like this:
~ The installer is at most half (and maybe only a third) of the full
installation. That's a HUGE optimization!
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