article-mort-the-tar-archive-format.mw - tgtimes - The Gopher Times
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article-mort-the-tar-archive-format.mw (1254B)
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1 .SH tgtimes
2 GNU tar(1) extraction is quadratic
3 .2C 16v
4 .
5 .PP
6 When implementing something from the ground, it gets possible to build-up a simple home-baked file format or protocol looking perfect without any cruft and legacy.
7 Easy to implement, fast to adopt, supporting everything you need from it, and not much more...
8 Likely an alternative to a huge elephant in the room: the current standard in place used by everyone, huge, with many extensions with many use-cases...
9 .
10 .PP
11 Why bother, then, with implementing the huge and difficult file format or protocol?
12 Maybe because it would be used by many software, and writing data in this slightly more bloated format would help making it compatible with all the software that already support it.
13 .
14 .PP
15 In this compromise, a limit can be drawn, across which the big and bloated format or protocol is dropped in favor of a simpler, more reasonable, less time-wasting alternative, eventually home-brewed.
16 .
17 .PP
18 .\fImort\fR is exploring this limit in the context of the GNU tar(1) archive format, in a detailed analysis covering the choices made and practical examples.
19 .
20 .PP
21 The result is a new tar implementation written for the single special-case of a 1.1 TiB file!
22 .
23 .FS
24 https://mort.coffee/home/tar/
25 .FE