> A while back, I was playing with ZipMagic on a friend's Windows
> system, and I have to admit I like the idea of treating zip files
> as directories. Is anybody working on a similar system for Linux,
Not that I know of. I think the userfs package has a tar filesystem,
though.
> or is there some basic reason why it couldn't work under Linux?
First of all, Linux people don't really use zip files. I can't think
of any reason why one couldn't be written, but there isn't much
motivation for writing one.
What are commonly used are tar.gz files. However, there is a
difference in how compression happens here. A zipfile is like a tar
of many gzipped files (yes?), whereas a tar.gz file is a gzipped tar
file. The gzip algorithm is stateful: there's no way of decompressing
the end of the file without decompressing the whole of the file. So
every time you access a contained file, you must either decompress
half (on average) of the tar.gz file, or you must keep the whole of
the decompressed tar.gz file in memory (or on disk, but that would
rather defeat the purpose). So, while possible, it is painful for any
sizeable tar.gz file. For small tar.gz files, it's just as easy to
say `tar xzf foo.tar.gz'. In both cases, you'd have to execute a
command before (tar xzf or mount) and after (rm -rf or umount). I
guess there are ways around some of these things, but I think that it
would still be something that one would write because it would be cool
rather than because of significant practical use.
I think someone's done it under HURD.
> I did write to Linus a while back asking about this, but so far no
> reply, so I have to assume I've got the wrong address for him...
He is the wrong person to write to for something like this. He hasn't
time to answer all such questions.
pjm.
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