Request for Features/Ideas: A std.archive package

[Liam McSherry via Digitalmars-d]

Phobos currently has packages for working with various archives 
(Zlib/Gzip, Zip), and it's probably reasonable to expect that 
support for more archive formats will be added in future. Before 
any more are added, it would probably be beneficial to define an 
interface that any modules adding support for archives should 
obey, and having archive related modules under std.archive for 
organisational purposes probably wouldn't hurt.

I saw a suggestion for improved archive support on the D wiki's 
wish list, and the code link 'std.archive' module in the review 
queue now 404s, so it looks to be the case that there isn't 
currently an effort to implement an archiving package for Phobos. 
What I would propose for such a package is:

- Split archives in to two categories: stream-based (Gzip, Zlib, 
Bzip, etc) and file-based (Zip, Tar).
- Make support for creating archives optional (e.g. by having 
IStreamArchive and IWritableStreamArchive).
- Make compression-related functionality separate (e.g. through 
an ICompressableArchive(T) interface, where T is an enum 
specifying algorithms). I'm not sure on this one, so ideas are 
especially welcome for it.
- A hierarchy of exceptions for implementations under std.archive 
rather than the current Phobos norm of everything having its own 
exceptions.

I'd like to know whether there would be demand for such a 
package, and what the community would want in terms of the API 
and features. I haven't yet written any code for the package as 
the API is going to be one of the most important parts, and I 
thought it would be best to have agreement on what is wanted 
before starting on it.