[Toybox] gzip --rsyncable

[isabella parakiss]

https://linux.die.net/man/1/fuse-zip

On 1/21/18, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> More or less a note to self, but I've had a todo item to write a
> "mount -t zip" driver for like a decade now, which can loopback mount a
> zip file as a filesystem. (Basically squashfs only using the
> near-ubiquitous zip file format as its filesystem layout. The fact you
> _can't_ just "mount -t blah.zip dir" and get a read-only view of the
> sucker is a crying shame. I remember the first time I sat down to do
> this my blocker was I needed to wait for the block layer rewrite in 2.3
> that allowed multiple mounts to finish because everything was too in flux.
>
> (The reason for zip not tar.gz is that zip compresses each file
> individually with metadata at the end, so you can list directories and
> open a specific file without having to start at the beginning and
> extract your way through megabytes of file linearly searching for it.
> The downside of zip is because they put the metadata at the end, to make
> modifying existing archives easier, a truncated archive is basically
> useless.)
>
> Anyway, the gzip --rsyncable option makes doing such a filesystem
> easier, because it means you can scan the file for dictionary resets and
> maintain a list of points you can randomly seek to.
>
> Rob
>
> P.S. You know all those people who say "somebody will steal your idea"?
> PLEASE STEAL MY #(%(&%& IDEA SO I DON'T HAVE TO IMPLEMENT THEM. Grrr...
>
> P.P.S. Yes I've said this for years.
> https://lists.celinuxforum.org/pipermail/celinux-dev/2010-January/000292.html
> was _eight_years_ago_, people still won't steal 'em. Grrr.
>
> P.P.P.S. Still driving to wisconsin. Somewhere, someone has to have
> photoshopped a state welcome sign to say "Missouri loves company."
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