[Python-Dev] Re: Planning to drop gzip compression for future releases.

[Scott David Daniels]

Charles Cazabon wrote:
> Scott David Daniels <Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org> wrote:
> 
>>.zip is the only one of these 3 formats that allows you to decompress a
>>few files without expanding the entire archive.  This feature is useful
>>to me at least (and makes up for the larger size).
> 
> tar supports that as well, and with better compression when paired with bzip2.
> Hint:  tar xzf archive [file] [...]

Right, but the only way it can extract the last file ofthetar archive is
to expand the entire arcive (in order to determine the bytes at the end
of the archive).  .zip looks in the directory for the file, reads the
bytes representing the compressed file (and only that file), and uses
them to expand the file to its original version.

> 
> Charles


-- 
-- Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org