this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Windows 11 adds native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats thanks to open-source library::undefined

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[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wtf are you on... It's literally just a way to turn a bunch of files into one. You can feed it into a makefile and make a single file installer like nothing. Apps are based on the concept. It's a key technology for all sorts of applications

It's so simple it works for anything, anywhere... It's like saying virtualization is cancer. It's often annoying when you have to interact with it directly, but everything we love is built on it

[–] Aux@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tared compressed files are bad archives. You can't retrieve a single file without unpacking everything. You can't add new files or replace contents of existing files without unpacking and repacking everything. They are just very outdated and have poor design. There are no reasons to use them.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're bad for storing files, but a great way to turn a folder into a file.

Installers don't need to be modified or used in part

[–] Aux@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why do you continue talking about installers? That's not the reason people invented archives and compression.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago

Ok, you have this design, which every installer in the world uses. Some are more compressed, some are signed, some bootstrap a downloader - but at the end of the day, every downloadable installer uses the same basic concept. From Windows installers to dmg to flatpacks to app bundles - same basic idea.

A tarball is a bunch of files laid end to end, it's good for one thing and one thing only - treating a bunch of files as one. It's great at that... If you want to compress it, it's not context aware enough to let you decrepit them individually - they're encrypted as one file

It's a bad way to store compressed archived info, I'll grant you that, but it's a great way to share a program or library to reproduce a bunch of files that make no sense to handle individually.

For another example, what about the layers of a photo editing program? What about the individual tracks in a music editing program?

It's an incredibly useful pattern that is used in countless ways. It's simple, easy to implement, and used everywhere to great effect