Inconsistencies between zipfile and tarfile APIs

[Ryan Kelly]

On Fri, 2011-07-22 at 01:45 -0400, Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 7/22/2011 12:48 AM, rantingrick wrote:
> > On Jul 21, 11:13 pm, Corey Richardson<kb1... at aim.com>  wrote:
> >> Excerpts from rantingrick's message of Thu Jul 21 23:46:05 -0400 2011:
> >>
> >>> I may have found the mother of all inconsitency warts when comparing
> >>> the zipfile and tarfile modules. Not only are the API's different, but
> >>> the entry and exits are differnet AND zipfile/tarfile do not behave
> >>> like proper file objects should.
> >>
> >> I agree, actually.
> 
> Hmm. Archives are more like directories than files. Windows, at least, 
> seems to partly treat zipfiles as more or less as such. Certainly, 7zip 
> present a directory interface. So opening a zipfile/tarfile would be 
> like opening a directory, which we normally do not do. On the other 
> hand, I am not sure I like python's interface to directories that much.

Indeed.  Actually, I'd say that archives are more like *entire
filesystems* than either files or directories.

We have a pretty nice ZipFS implementation as part of the PyFilesystem
project:

  http://packages.python.org/fs/


If anyone cares enough to whip up a TarFS implementation it would be
gratefully merged into trunk.  (There may even be the start of one in
the bugtracker somewhere, I don't recall...)


  Cheers,

    Ryan


-- 
Ryan Kelly
http://www.rfk.id.au  |  This message is digitally signed. Please visit
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