On May 22, 2010, at 09:41, Evan Phoenix wrote: > On May 22, 2010, at 3:58 AM, Benoit Daloze wrote: >> On 22 May 2010 01:44, Caleb Clausen <vikkous / gmail.com> wrote: >>> I'm not a big fan of .zip either, but give it its due. >>>=20 >>> Zip has the advantage that you can 'seek' to arbitrary files within >>> the archive without needing to decompress all the other files that >>> come before it. That's not true of gzipped tar files..... >>>=20 >>> Because each member of a zip file is a compressed separately. But = this >>> same design decision is why .tar.gz compresses better than .zip, = given >>> the same collection of files. >>>=20 >> What about LZMA (p7zip, xz) ? >=20 > I have looked into this in the past and could not find any open source = libraries for reading 7z or xz files. That is the biggest reason not to = use them, we don't want to start this project off writing a container = format. Does Rubinius still have the archive feature? Does it still use my ar = implementation? RubyGems implements tar files, so it would be easy to glue together = Gem::Package::TarReader/Writer and Zlib::GzipReader/Writer for a proof = of concept that will work without having to figure out what is "optimal"=