Re: [dev] wrap: minimalist archiving tool

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Connor Lane Smith <cls_AT_lubutu.com> wrote:
> On 9 August 2010 04:54, David Tweed <david.tweed_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> The one thing that leaps out at me is that there's no checksumming of
>> either the individual files or the whole the archive file performed,
>> so if you give it a damaged archive you won't be able to tell or
>> isolate the damaged files.
>
> I figure the archive doesn't need to be able to checksum. Many
> compression formats and transmission protocols already checksum -
> reading a gzipped tarball from the web can result in up to four
> checksums. So if you're worried about integrity, just compress. If
> you're forced to use raw wraps and you're worried about storage, not
> transmission, you can always include checksums as Szabolcs said.

I think it depends on the use case. I was thinking about actually
archiving data, in which case if something has gone wrong on your
storage medium you want to be able to recover as much of the data as
you can, particularly the files which are undamaged. (It looks like
once the extractor "desynchronises" you may not get remaining files
even if that part of the file is uncorrupted.) But there are more
sophisticated archiving solutions so that's probably not a use case
worth worrying about.

-- 
cheers, dave tweed__________________________
computer vision reasearcher: david.tweed_AT_gmail.com
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