DMD Source Archive - Why?

[Nick Treleaven]

On Thursday, 11 April 2024 at 15:28:34 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 11 April 2024 at 01:36:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> If we're going to add features to a .tar file, like an index, 
>> aren't we then creating our own format and won't be able to 
>> use existing .tar programs?
>
> No. tar programs would work fine with it. We could indicate 
> they are normal files, and normal tar programs would just 
> extract an "index" file when expanding, or we could indicate 
> they are vendor-specific extensions, which should be ignored or 
> processed as normal files by other tar programs. We are not the 
> first ones to think of these things, it is in the spec.

Sounds like a good solution. Users would be able to use e.g. any 
GUI program that supports tar to extract a file from the archive. 
The advantage is for reading. D-specific tools should be used to 
write the file. If there is any concern about this, it could even 
have a different extension so long as the file format is standard 
tar - users that know this can still benefit from tar readers. 
There seems to be precedent for this - apparently .jar files are 
.zip files.

>> Yes, one can skip through a .tar archive indexing as one goes. 
>> The problem is one winds up reading the .tar archive. With the 
>> .sar format, the index is at the beginning and none of the 
>> rest of the file is read in, unless actually needed. .tar is 
>> the only archive format I'm aware of that does not have an 
>> index section, and that's because it's designed for 
>> append-only magtapes. (Talk about ancient obsolete technology!)
>
> This would be a fallback, when an index isn't provided as the 
> first file. So normal tar source files could be supported.

Or just error if a tar file doesn't have the expected index file.