Ok, you have this design, which every installer in the world uses. Some are more compressed, some are signed, some bootstrap a downloader - but at the end of the day, every downloadable installer uses the same basic concept. From Windows installers to dmg to flatpacks to app bundles - same basic idea.
A tarball is a bunch of files laid end to end, it’s good for one thing and one thing only - treating a bunch of files as one. It’s great at that… If you want to compress it, it’s not context aware enough to let you decrepit them individually - they’re encrypted as one file
It’s a bad way to store compressed archived info, I’ll grant you that, but it’s a great way to share a program or library to reproduce a bunch of files that make no sense to handle individually.
For another example, what about the layers of a photo editing program? What about the individual tracks in a music editing program?
It’s an incredibly useful pattern that is used in countless ways. It’s simple, easy to implement, and used everywhere to great effect
Aux@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Again, not the reason for archives.
theneverfox@pawb.social 10 months ago
… Do you think archives are just when you store old files on magnetic tape?
Aux@lemmy.world 10 months ago
For fucks sake… That’s what YOU think! And that’s the problem! TAR is a shit archive format. Deal with it.
theneverfox@pawb.social 10 months ago
LMAO that makes so much sense. No wonder you got all weird when I brought up installers. You’re picturing a file in a folder that contains something you want
There’s a lot of kinds of archives.
Tarballs don’t suck, they’re just not for you. You can go back to your blissful ignorance of how often you’ve used a tarball seamlessly without realizing it happened, because someone else understood the upside of the tech