<![CDATA[hey.]]>hey. you know how every code forge in existence offers you two types of downloads: tar and zip?

i wonder if you can make that into one file that is both tar and zip.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/topic/b2da620f-685c-43b4-84ad-258ffb695e76/hey.RSS for NodeFri, 01 May 2026 09:19:07 GMTMon, 13 Apr 2026 10:08:56 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:52:20 GMT]]>@whitequark ... I like the way you're thinking.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://infosec.exchange/users/dascandy/statuses/116397017664114419https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://infosec.exchange/users/dascandy/statuses/116397017664114419Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:52:20 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:32:10 GMT]]>@david_chisnall @Ronflaix this is in fact my motivating example: I have a tarball that's 3 TB long, and I don't have a spare 3 TB (or spare 3.5 hours) every time I need one file from it

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396938403488438https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396938403488438Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:32:10 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:30:39 GMT]]>@Ronflaix @whitequark

Not just Windows. The fact that you can extract individual files from a zip without full extraction has a few advantages in some use cases. Including using the file as backing store for a read-only filesystem.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://infosec.exchange/users/david_chisnall/statuses/116396932442359976https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://infosec.exchange/users/david_chisnall/statuses/116396932442359976Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:30:39 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:26:20 GMT]]>@grawity iirc the zip file headers can appear in a somewhat random order

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396915445453413https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396915445453413Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:26:20 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:20:06 GMT]]>@dpk @leah actually yeah this is a good point, you only really need to compress source code in transit (who even stores tarballs anymore)

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396890920394215https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396890920394215Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:20:06 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:57 GMT]]>@pervognsen yeah i know

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396886407244441https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396886407244441Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:57 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:39 GMT]]>@leah to me the benefit of tar.gz is that it can represent the x bit

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396885244840786https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396885244840786Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:39 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:23 GMT]]>@whitequark

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://k.iim.gay/users/kim/statuses/01KP35JY5GDPK4FPGNS2HD9NDAhttps://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://k.iim.gay/users/kim/statuses/01KP35JY5GDPK4FPGNS2HD9NDAMon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:23 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:16 GMT]]>@leah @whitequark For a download you can send Content-Encoding: gzip instead of Content-Type: application/gzip (or as well as, it won’t make a difference if the whole stream is already compressed)

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/dpk/statuses/116396883732598595https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/dpk/statuses/116396883732598595Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:16 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:17:33 GMT]]>@whitequark I think zip also has headers between members? this reminds me of one .zip file I had encountered which had different contents if you scanned it forwards from the beginning (python zip module) vs if you went backwards from the trailer (normal programs)

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/grawity/statuses/116396880889888224https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/grawity/statuses/116396880889888224Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:17:33 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:17:24 GMT]]>@whitequark There's also a whole genre of polyglot hacks: https://github.com/corkami/docs/blob/master/AbusingFileFormats/README.md.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.social/users/pervognsen/statuses/116396880347114835https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.social/users/pervognsen/statuses/116396880347114835Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:17:24 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:16:52 GMT]]>@whitequark probably, but the benefit of tar.gz is that it can compress across files.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://blahaj.social/users/leah/statuses/116396878251760290https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://blahaj.social/users/leah/statuses/116396878251760290Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:16:52 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:15:52 GMT]]>oh, i think this can be made to work!

Link Preview Image
]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396874325683454https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396874325683454Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:15:52 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:13:33 GMT]]>@Ronflaix yeah

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396865169637168https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396865169637168Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:13:33 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:13:29 GMT]]>@zardoz03 upsetting and probably somewhat feasible if we can get every tar implementation to ignore the first member somehow

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396864911091426https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396864911091426Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:13:29 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:13:17 GMT]]>@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems I figure if you could generate a gzip stream that stops generating back refs at the start of each file so a zip header can point to individual files, but that would still read as a (suboptimal) solid archive, that'd do it?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://lethallava.land/notes/al0lmmhpozhttps://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://lethallava.land/notes/al0lmmhpozMon, 13 Apr 2026 10:13:17 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:12:54 GMT]]>
  • zip has its trailer at the end of the file, while tar has headers in between archive members, so that works out
  • gzip is DEFLATE with a header, while zip supports DEFLATE, so this also works out
  • DEFLATE is almost closed under concatenation (there is a "this block is the last one" flag), but not quite

    • if there was a way to make each archive member's data its own DEFLATE stream, and each tar header its own DEFLATE stream too, and then prepend a gzip header and append a zip trailer, it could all work!

    ]]>    https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396862608693683https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116396862608693683Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:12:54 GMT    <![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:12:38 GMT]]>@whitequark zip because Windows?

    (Nowadays windows 11 can unzip more than .zip anyway so that's slowly getting "solved")

    Also yeah, that kind of trick could be really fun but ultimately they would still be .zips

    ]]>    https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.gamedev.place/users/Ronflaix/statuses/116396861563399263https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.gamedev.place/users/Ronflaix/statuses/116396861563399263Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:12:38 GMT    <![CDATA[Reply to hey. on Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:12:31 GMT]]>@whitequark it would be incredibly funny if it was a shar archive aswell, and would be the simplest way of doing it. just execute the archive as a shell script and it chooses whether to unpack the tar or the zip part

    ]]>    https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.online/users/zardoz03/statuses/116396861117650159https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.online/users/zardoz03/statuses/116396861117650159Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:12:31 GMT