SAR

Stephen Pair spair at acm.org
Wed Nov 20 16:21:53 UTC 2002


> 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

WinZip seems to work just fine with zip files containing header information.
But if not all zip tools can deal with it, then maybe it isn't the right
thing to do.  If however the zip file standard was designed to accomodate
such header information, then I'd say why not do it?

The only benefit (and perhaps this isn't worth the effort) is that it gives
you even more flexibility.  For example, I could put my main install script
into a zip member called "installme" instead of "install/preamble".  The
header of the zip file would call "installme" and clicking "file in" in the
file browser would work just fine without needing to introducing any new
loader classes or code into the system.

- Stephen




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