Re: EFS and gnome/kde (was Re: Request: Test suite for EFS.)

["Dirk-Jan C . Binnema" <bulkmail dds nl>]

On Thu Feb 24, 2000 at 01:16:16PM +0000, u07ih@abdn.ac.uk wrote:
> > Would it be possible to use the tar format, instead of a special
> > gnome/kde-file-in-a-filesystem format?
> > Tar is standard, and will probably remain as a standard for compund files.
> 
> Tar is also flat.
> To insert a line of text, you have to untar the entire thing, and then retar is
> up afterwards. This requires having enough diskspace to untar things into, and
> takes more time. EFS is a filesystem that works along the same principles that
> other filesystems work...you don't have to rewrite your entire hard drive if you
> change your .bashrc file.

Indeed. 

The problems with 'tar' get only worse when you consider that different parts of some document (say a spreadssheet embedded inside a wordprocessing doc) need to access their data independently. The spreadsheet won't know about the compound file, it will only get a pointer to some "embedded file" (storage) from the containing document.

Dirk-Jan.


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