XAR

Posted May 30, 2007 21:04 UTC (Wed) by claesh (guest, #45513)
Parent article: rpm5.org launched

What I found more interesting than the RPM announcment was the (for me) unknown archiver XAR. What are the chances that xar will become widespread in the free software community? Technically, it seems interesting. Gnu tar still does not have support for xattrs...

to post comments

XAR

Posted Jun 7, 2007 9:56 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

If it can do zip-like per-file compression rather than being a compressed stream (important for robustness especially across multi-volume backups) and remain extractable without a master index at end-of-file, provide archive integrity features and offer a supplimental and non-critical archive index for faster access ... then I'll be on it in a second. Per-file encryption would be a killer too.

tar+gz and zip are both uninspiring for backups and other purposes. Both are too prone to certain types of damage causing total loss of the contents of the archive, and neither provide any solid insurance of archive integrity.