this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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.taris pretty bad as it lacks in index, making it impossible to quickly seek around in the file. The compression on top adds another layer of complication. It might still work great as tape archiver, but for sending files around the Internet it is quite horrible. It's really just getting dragged around for cargo cult reasons, not because it's good at the job it is doing.In general I find the archive situation a little annoying, as archives are largely completely unnecessary, that's what we have directories for. But directories don't exist as far as HTML is concerned and only single files can be downloaded easily. So everything has to get packed and unpacked again, for absolutely no reason. It's a job computers should handle transparently in the background, not an explicit user action.
Many file managers try to add support for
.zipand allow you to go into them like it is a folder, but that abstraction is always quite leaky and never as smooth as it should be..tar.pixz/.tpxz has an index and uses LZMA and permits for parallel compression/decompression (increasingly-important on modern processors).
https://github.com/vasi/pixz
It's packaged in Debian, and I assume other Linux distros.
Only downside is that GNU tar doesn't have a single-letter shortcut to use pixz as a compressor, the way it does "z" for gzip, "j" for bzip2, or "J" for xz (LZMA); gotta use the more-verbose "-Ipixz".
Also, while I don't recommend it, IIRC gzip has a limited range that the effects of compression can propagate, and so even if you aren't intentionally trying to provide random access, there is software that leverages this to hack in random access as well. I don't recall whether someone has rigged it up with tar and indexing, but I suppose if someone were specifically determined to use gzip, one could go that route.