Re: [TCLCORE] making zipfs mounts writable

[Julian N. <ju...@pr...>]

Hi Christian,

Fair enough - thanks for the background info.
Yes, things like being able to load a dll/so directly from 
memory/mounted zip are probably more useful - but tricky to do 
particularly on windows I hear.

Without the capability of directly writing mounted zips, I'm reasonably 
happy to write zip contents out to the filesystem for rebuilding 
purposes - but the splitting between exe & zip is a pain point.

Cheers,
Julian


On 2024-10-15 5:54 pm, Christian Werner wrote:
> 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
>
>
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