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A comment on We Need A Standard Layered Image Format. Parent comment

Re:We Need A Standard Layered Image Format by Someone on Tuesday April 30, 2013 @07:11PM (#5635486)
Apple also uses zip for Keynote, Pages and Numbers documents, again for very much the same reasons, and Java's .jar, .war, .ear, .whatevar files also use zip.

.zip seems to be the universal 'combine some stuff in a single file' format, probably because it is old enough to be guaranteed patent free (OTOH: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/06/is-zip-in-the-public-do... and http://www.pkware.com/support/zip-app-note. http://www.pkware.com/documents/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT only mentions encryption and patching as patented)

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Re:We Need A Standard Layered Image Format by pmahoney on Tuesday April 30, 2013 @09:51PM (#5636015)
It also, unlike tar.gz, provides an index for easily seeking to and extracting just one file from the zip archive. My understanding is that doing this in a .tar.gz means unzipping and processing the whole tarball as a stream.
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Re:We Need A Standard Layered Image Format by derefr on Tuesday April 30, 2013 @10:08PM (#5636059)
Indeed--squashfs was basically created to deal with the inadequacies of random-access-extraction from compressed tarballs.
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