With recent discussions about guaranteeing some stability for our archives, here's a document which specifies a canonical tar format we can use, based on the pax format. It contains a sufficient amount of explanation about how the format works to (hopefully) be easily understandable, and it explains the benefits of the extremely rigid format it defines. If we decide that we'd like to implement extensions to it in the future, it can be easily extended. My original approach allowed specifying version extensions to specify that things like permissions or timestamps were persisted, but I simplified for ease of use, since we don't technically need those changes. Feedback about this approach is welcome, and after some discussion, I plan to send a future version with an actual implementation and tests. brian m. carlson (1): Document a fixed tar format for interoperability Documentation/technical/tarball.txt | 234 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 234 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/technical/tarball.txt
