Re: GZip{In,Out}putStream in GIO?

["Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic excite com>]

From: Steve Fr-23;cinaux, Date: 03/08/2009 19:38, Wrote:

> Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > I could think of at least 5 types of compressions that would be useful
> > to have without having to use a command-line tool to decompress:
> > - gzip for anything and everything that can come from a web server (in
> > my case, iTunes Music Store playlist parsing, or more widely, GOffice
> > file formats)
> > - zip for OpenOffice.org documents and Comic Books (evince)
> > - 7zip/LZMA/Xz formats for Comic Books
> > - Rar for the same as above
> Aren't there two classes of file types there ? Compression vs Archiving

Archiving formats would be better supported by GVFS, wouldn't they...?  Treating an archive as a virtual directory.

However, zip has a few compression formats, rar compression can be applied both before and after bundling of the files (a rar "solid archive" is similar to a tar.gz archive).  There may be some value to supporting those compression formats even without supporting the entire archive format.  The compression is pretty much the hard part of handling these archives.


Going the extra step further, though, the next obvious idea would be to do the same thing that gunzip does when you concatenate together a series of gzipped files - it simply returns the uncompressed content of each file sequentially.

I guess, though, you still need to understand the archive format, for at least some of those formats.  So I suppose some kind of archive handler would be needed to pick out the individual streams for concatenation.  Given that, reading a zip file as a compressed stream could instantiate a concatenation object that sets up the appropriate archive handler and just iterates over the available files, joining the uncompressed data of each individual decompression stream together as a single continuous stream.  Which would give you the option to set up the archive handler yourself and extract the one(s) you want individually.  This would be a boon even for gzipped files, giving you the option to extract concatenated compressed streams individually rather than as a solid indistinguishable stream.

The ability to manipulate archives as well as simple compression would be fantastic.  I did at one stage need to apply a "filter" to the files matching a certain mask within a tgz archive.  With support like that, I could uncompress the tgz, split the tar, pass through files I'm not interested in, apply the filtering to the ones I am, and then repackage and re-compress the lot on the way out, without having to mess around with spawning external commands and correctly handling the myriad of things that can go wrong.


Fredderic

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