Re: [TCLCORE] making zipfs mounts writable

[Christian W. <Chr...@t-...>]

Julian,

while technically feasible IMHO adding full write support to zipfs is a
inferior feature since there are many formats much better suited for
writability (what about sqlar for example).

Let's not forget how zipfs came into being: Android installable packages
(*.apk files) are basically zips used somewhat similar how JVMs use *.jar
archives/object code libraries. Thus it seemed useful to have Tcl core
support for mounting since all the Tcl library stuff can directly go into
an *.apk and be read from there. Later on this approach was extended for
traditional Tcl binaries/executables.

Still the main focus was on having a read-only container format which can
hold bundled Tcl library and application code. Yes, there's zipfs::wrmax
which stems from my early experiments to have means to apply small patches
to single files at runtime. But this was never intended to be a mainstream
feature for general write support. In hindsight possibly even a misfit which
accidentally survived (and went into Tcl 9.0 in the meantime) instead of
being buried early.

Fields of zipfs where I see the main energy should be spent on are glob
performance optimization by possibly adding an internal caching layer dealing
with directories and improving embedding native code (shared libraries) by
using dynamic linking techniques like BSD fdlopen() (didn't Mozilla invent
some interal trickery to forge this on Win32 even?).

My 2e-2 currency units, BR
Christian