Stephen,

> Yes, I may not be the brightest person, but I do know they are zip files
> and I know you want to put other stuff in there.

Oops, sorry - I thought you hadn't realized this because what you are
describing is identical to SAR.

> What I'm proposing is to generalize things a bit and make it so that the
> file in mechanism gives you enough support that you can put a chunk of
> code at the beginning of a zip file and then manipulate that zip file in
> whatever way you want (i.e. load the change set and package members,
> copy images and other files to a certain location, etc).  That would be
> entirely complementary to the SAR conventions.

But what would be the point? Everything you are describing is already
present in SAR and being used by various packages. The only difference between
"putting a chunk in front of a zip file" vs. using ZipArchive to put it into
"install/preamble" is that the latter generates valid zip files. So what do you
hope to achieve that isn't already present in SAR?! Can you give a concrete
example for why putting a chunk upfront would have any advantage over using an
SAR file?!

Cheers,
  - Andreas

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