Should Tarballs Be On Their Way Out The Door In 2017?

[CrystalGamma]

The only thing I'd like to have is a SINGLE tool that compresses. As it is now, many tools on Windows (and also on Linux) first decompress the xz/gz/whatever into a tar, and then I need to open/decompress the tar too.

Can this next-gen compressor do both tasks at once?

My version of tar (GNU tar) does this already and has done so for years. Look for the -j, -J, -z, -Z, --lzma, --lzop, --lzip options in the manpage.

[signals]

The only thing I'd like to have is a SINGLE tool that compresses. As it is now, many tools on Windows (and also on Linux) first decompress the xz/gz/whatever into a tar, and then I need to open/decompress the tar too.

Can this next-gen compressor do both tasks at once?

tar can already do this with most common compressors. See -j, -J, -z, -Z, --lzma, etc.

TAR has been around for so long because it is useful and widely supported, and not because nobody couldn't think of any better.

He's just another idiot who uses the wrong tools, then thinks old equals bad and wants to implement yet another archiving tool. As if we needed yet another archiver.

And calling it JPAK when his name is Jussi Pakkanen sure ticks another box.

Well, old doesn't equal bad, but it doesn't equal good either. If you can identify real issues with an existing solution and fix them, great! Unfortunately, I doubt that this is really solving an issue experienced by the majority of users of tarballs. Decompression time hasn't been an issue on any modern hardware (that could be considered more than a microcontroller) for quite some time. Unless you have a VERY large archive or a VERY slow CPU, the time to decompress is usually minimal. Random access isn't a huge problem if you can decompress the file in the blink of an eye anyway. Just decompress it and ignore the data you don't need.

While the current situation is far from perfect, it's "good enough" and fixing the problems that most users don't notice isn't going to be enough to displace the good enough de-facto standard.

[starshipeleven]

I can't imagine that being a problem, but it goes against Unix' philosophy of "less is more". I think it's cleaner to have a utility that takes a stream and compresses it and another utility that takes whatever and turns it into a stream.

Implementation details. I'm talking of the program I use, be it a GUI or a CLI tool.

Currently (GNU) tar's CLI can tar/untar+compress/decompress too (by using automatically the appropriate tools in your system), and that's fine. Newer versions also choose automatically compressor/decompressor if you have the right file extension.

But waay too much GUI programs still fail to realize that if there is a SINGLE file that happens to be a tar inside a compressed archive I *MIGHT* want to actually see its contents right away and not be forced to click again and open another window to open it.

And before you ask, it took me quite some time to learn tar's CLI (not because it's particularly difficult, but because I was using it rarely and kept forgetting).

bad, bad boy.

I usually make tiny scripts in my home's /bin folder for that.

[starshipeleven]

My version of tar (GNU tar) does this already and has done so for years. Look for the -j, -J, -z, -Z, --lzma, --lzop, --lzip options in the manpage.

Sorry, should have said GUI programs. I know GNU tar well enough lol, but I'd like to doubleclick on things to open them, every now and then.

And on windows this "double compressed file" thing confuses people to no end.

Also as I said, newer tars should not need the decompression option if the file extension is correct, and on creation with -a they should also figure out the compression by looking at extension.
the tar here (version 1.27.1, from 2013) supports this.

[starshipeleven]

TAR has been around for so long because it is useful and widely supported, and not because nobody couldn't think of any better.

He's just another idiot who uses the wrong tools, then thinks old equals bad and wants to implement yet another archiving tool. As if we needed yet another archiver.

And calling it JPAK when his name is Jussi Pakkanen sure ticks another box.

Aww come on, that's just a guy experimenting and posting his results with a provocative title, put down that flamethrower.

[CrystalGamma]

Sorry, should have said GUI programs. I know GNU tar well enough lol, but I'd like to doubleclick on things to open them, every now and then.

And on windows this "double compressed file" thing confuses people to no end.

Also as I said, newer tars should not need the decompression option if the file extension is correct, and on creation with -a they should also figure out the compression by looking at extension.
the tar here (version 1.27.1, from 2013) supports this.

Well, on my system I have at least two GUI programs that will deal with both the .tar and .xz layers of a .tar.xz file (and probably the same for .tar.gz) at once: Dolphin (KDE file manager) and file-roller (GNOME archive manager).
Just because Windows software is no good doesn't mean there is no software that can work well with these kinds of file. Microsoft (or ISVs) just need to step up their game.

[bug77]

Well, on my system I have at least two GUI programs that will deal with both the .tar and .xz layers of a .tar.xz file (and probably the same for .tar.gz) at once: Dolphin (KDE file manager) and file-roller (GNOME archive manager).
Just because Windows software is no good doesn't mean there is no software that can work well with these kinds of file. Microsoft (or ISVs) just need to step up their game.

I think what he was saying is that he wishes all file managers would mature to the point of handling archives that have been tar'd first in a sane way.

[trek]

with the fall of interest in their products, are the gnome folks starting to devastate other areas of interest like cli?

[DMJC]

14 competing standards... let's add randomised file access... there are 15 competing standards.

[kalrish]

And before you ask, it took me quite some time to learn tar's CLI (not because it's particularly difficult, but because I was using it rarely and kept forgetting).

It happens to everyone.