Re: [Bug-tar] wishlist: transparent compression on file- and not archive level

[Christian Hammers]

Hello

On 2006-07-17 Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Helmut Waitzmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Christian Hammers <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > [zip the individual file chunks rather than the complete tape archive]
> > >Of course this would be an incompatible change but when calling the
> > >result .tar.czip (chunkwise zipped) that should be ok, or?
> >
> > >What do you think?
> >
> > One shouldn't make gnu tar's behavior depend upon the name of the archive
> > file.  Please, don't let tar decide what to do with a given archive file
> > by drawing conclusions out of the file name.
> 
> You cannot implement reliable per file compression.
> 
> You either need to compress the file 2 times in order to get the compressed 
> size before archiving and then it will fail if the file changes meanwhile
> 
> Or you compress to a /tmp file and then you have an unknown size limit for 
> compressed files.......

The approach I thought of was the second. Surely there would be a new size
limit but it could be documented and would most probably not discourage
most admins from using the new option. Especially when creating a backup
file one has to care for free disk space anyway.

bye,

-christian-

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