On Wednesday 31 October 2001 07:56 am, Robert Feldt wrote:

> Ok, but how can this be used with Ryan's scheme with metadata? Is there
> some way you can attach info to zip archive which winzip et al will not
> look at?

Who cares if winzip looks at it? I'd use, say, the first file, uncompressed 
for metadata. This makes it easy to find (scan forward to the first member 
header tag, read the header, and you're at the data).

But if you want something that isn't represented as a file, there are:

* zip file comments (there are also per-member comments)

* "extra fields" that come after each member header. Existing zip programs 
will at least skip them on extraction (each of these fields have a length and 
type).

If you used the extra fields, no existing zip utility would allow editing 
them, but you couldn't use existing zip utilities to build Gems (which might 
be a good thing).

If you used zip or winzip on such a file for re-organization, the extra 
fields might get lost.

But if you wanted to have a better indication that all the members in such a 
file came from RubyGems, this would be helpful.


-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned / bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com