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

[Delgarde]

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

No - it's not a compressor at all... just an archiver like tar. But the concept is to design an archive format for the actual use case - and remember, tar was designed not for file transfer, but for tape backups... it just happened to be useful for archiving files. The JPAK format is instead designed for the "tarball" use case, so the layout is optimised to a) give faster access to the table of contents, and b) give a compressor like XZ better patterns to work with.

[ssokolow]

But why would one even want random file access? The only scenario I can think of where that would be useful is distributing updates to only unpack updated files, but we already have Delta for that.

Currently, it punishes anyone who just wants a listing of contents or wants to extract just specific files. (Both things which really make tar look terrible to people using GUI archive tools)

[geearf]

But why would one even want random file access? The only scenario I can think of where that would be useful is distributing updates to only unpack updated files, but we already have Delta for that.

If I understand the question correctly, that allows to only decompress the chunk of data you need.
For example when you run an emulator of a compressed iso, the emulator doesn't need to decompress it all before starting the game.