dmdz

[Walter Bright]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Heh, incidentally I just needed a tar reader a few days ago, so I wrote 
> an embryo of a base class etc. I'll add it soon.
> 
> The basic interface is:
> 
> (a) open the archive
> 
> (b) get an input range for it. The range iterates over archive entries.
> 
> (c) You can look at archive info, and if you want to extract you can get 
> a .byChunk() range to extract it. That's also an input range.
> 
> For now I'm only concerned with reading... writing needs to be added.

That's great, but I only suggest that this not be added to Phobos until a 
generic archive interface is also added. That way, we can constantly add support 
for new archive formats without requiring users to change their code.

Some suggestions for that:

1. The archive type should be represented by a string literal, not an enum. This 
way, users can add other archive types without having to touch the Phobos source 
code.

2. The reader should auto-detect the archive type based on the file contents, 
not the file name, and then call the appropriate factory method.