[Python-ideas] Adding ziplib (original) (raw)

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Tue Feb 17 22:17:10 CET 2015

If bikeshedding about the name is all we're doing at this point I wouldn't worry about the ancient BBS era .arc file format that nobody will write a Python library to read. :) I'd propose "archivers" as a module name, though arclib is also nice. If you want to really play homage to a good little used archive format, call it arjlib. ;)

"The" problem with zipfile, and tarfile and similar today is that they are all under maintained and have a variety of things inherent to the underlying archive formats that are not common to all of them. ie: zip files have an end of archive central directory index. tar files do not. rar files can be seen as a seemingly (sadly?) common successor to zip files. No doubt there are others (7z? cpio?). zip files compress individual files, tar files don't support compression as it is applied to the whole archive after the fact. The amount and type of directory information available within each of these varies. And that doesn't even touch multi file multi part archive support that some support for very horrible hacky reasons.

coming up with common API for these with the key features needed by all is interesting, doubly so for someone pedantic enough to get an implementation of each correct, but it should be done as a third party library and should ideally not use the stdlib zip or tar support at all. Do such libraries exist for other languages? Any C++ that could be reused? Is there such a thing as high quality code for this kind of task?

-gps

On Tue Feb 17 2015 at 1:05:04 PM Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19 at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 10:20 PM, Florian Bruhin <me at the-compiler.org> wrote:

* Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19 at gmail.com> [2015-02-16 19:00:33 -0600]: > On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote: > > > I love the idea (I've had to write my own custom wrapper around a subset > > of functionality for zip and tgz a few times, and I don't remember enjoying > > it...), and I especially like the idea of starting with the ABCs (which > > would hopefully encourage all those people writing cpio and 7z and whatever > > parsers to conform to the same API, even if they do so by wrapping LGPL > > libs like libarchive or even subprocessing out to command-line tools). > > > > But why "ziplib"? Why not something generic like "archive" that doesn't > > sound like it's specific to ZIP files? > > > > > This occurred to me a few moments ago. How about arclib?

To me, that sounds like a library to handle ARC files: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC(fileformat)

Darn... Does anybody even use that format anymore? Florian -- http://www.the-compiler.org | me at the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP) GPG: 916E B0C8 FD55 A072 | http://the-compiler.org/pubkey.asc I love long mails! | http://email.is-not-s.ms/

Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas at python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ -- Ryan If anybody ever asks me why I prefer C++ to C, my answer will be simple: "It's becauseslejfp23(@#Q*(E*EIdc-SEGFAULT. Wait, I don't think that was nul-terminated." Personal reality distortion fields are immune to contradictory evidence. - srean Check out my website: http://kirbyfan64.github.io/

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