Stephen,

> If however the zip file standard was designed to accomodate
> such header information, then I'd say why not do it?

Is this stated somewhere?! I can't find anything about it in
http://www.pkware.com/products/white_papers/white_appnote.html

> 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.

Oh but you certainly would need new code unless you want to do it a rather
complex way with using reflection to find the stream, then figure out if you
got zip-archive and then set it up so that it actually works (which might be
quite problematic considering that older zip archives may not be aware of the
prefix chunk). It would be quite hard to make this backward compatible in any
reasonable way. And if there's code added anyways then it makes a lot of
sense to me to have a dedicated loader class rather than handling this in
PositionableStream or so.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

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