On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 11:57:09PM -0400, Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >the ar file format is much better established then jar, quick to access
> >(unlike jar), and very very very much simpler.
>
> Excuse me?!?! JAR is used by every Java implementation in
> existence, and since it is 100% compatible with ZIP, means you have
> all of those implementations as well.
Ahem, still what I said above is true, isn't it? ar certainly is better
establsihed, is faster to acesss (no compression), and is also extremely
simple (it's fully human readable!)
> Second, because of ar's simplicity it isn't suitable for this
> task for a number of technical reasons including name size
> limitations, incomplete hierarchy support, etc.
Well, ar's limitations with respect to name length etc. are in practise
not every severe (nobody will have 10000 character file names (the ar
limit), and even antique ar implemnentations will support up to 255
characters).
> > a complex container format like jar is not very helpful,
>
> JAR/Zip isn't very complex and there is LOTS of
> implementations to work from...
Same is true for ar, except that it is even simpler and faster :)
I am not opposed to uncompressed jar files, but compression is certainly a
bad idea (the jar compression algorithm is rather ineffective), so rathet
than to support half of a complex file format a very simple one that
simply stores files makes sense to me.
> Yes, you need to bundle files, BUT in a hierarchical
> organization, esp. for layers...
well, nobody keeps you from doing that in ar.
(will abstain from any further jar/ar discussion... if you are
inzterested, check the file formats itself).
--
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