this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59569 readers
3431 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ok, you have this design, which every installer in the world uses. Some are more compressed, some are signed, some bootstrap a downloader - but at the end of the day, every downloadable installer uses the same basic concept. From Windows installers to dmg to flatpacks to app bundles - same basic idea.
A tarball is a bunch of files laid end to end, it's good for one thing and one thing only - treating a bunch of files as one. It's great at that... If you want to compress it, it's not context aware enough to let you decrepit them individually - they're encrypted as one file
It's a bad way to store compressed archived info, I'll grant you that, but it's a great way to share a program or library to reproduce a bunch of files that make no sense to handle individually.
For another example, what about the layers of a photo editing program? What about the individual tracks in a music editing program?
It's an incredibly useful pattern that is used in countless ways. It's simple, easy to implement, and used everywhere to great effect
Again, not the reason for archives.
... Do you think archives are just when you store old files on magnetic tape?
For fucks sake... That's what YOU think! And that's the problem! TAR is a shit archive format. Deal with it.