WinRAR allows you to browse a .tar.gz without extracting it, 7-zip extracts the .tar to a temp file. It makes working with large .tar.gz files impossible.
(Yes I know that because of how .tar works WinRAR must decompresses it to build the files list. But it beats having to write a 1TB .tar to disk just to see the file listing.
tar.gz files don't have a central directory (like zip), and they are compressed as one stream (almost always non-seekable)
What might help is saving the state of the decompressor periodically, rather than just the index in the file. But that's getting pretty far into the weeds for an optimization to an infrequently used feature.
Can definitely see why systems like python's wheel would choose zip as it's just always been natively seekable out of the box. I believe Nix now does something similar with flake repo archives being zipfiles in the store, as they can be seeked and evaluated without a full decompression, saving a lot of disk space.
.gz does not give you enough information to randomly seek within the big compressed .gz file, so you cannot skip past files within a .tar archive.
But if you load a .gz file and consume the entire stream, but keep periodic checkpoints of your past sliding window (about 64KB) every 1MB or so, you can get random access with 1MB granularity. You still had to consume the entire stream to build the lookup though.
No, 7-zip only deletes the file after you close its window, so as long as you don't close 7-zip any apps should be able to open those files. Winrar doesn't delete on close, but that has its own problems, namely that you accumulate a bunch of extracted files in your %TEMP% directory, and have to run disk cleanup to delete them.
E: Tried again with procmon monitoring 7-zip, and after it completed writing the file it deleted it.
Sometimes you see a word used a new way and wonder if you've just been wrong all these years.
You'll see codec used in things like text encoding.
To be clear the codec implements the compression (or other encoding) algorithm. So when talking about codec's we mean the implementation. But when talking about the algorithm, we are talking about the standard of encoding the encoder or decoder implements.
No, rare in general.
It's a layman's co-opting, and laymen outnumber specialists in every field.
doctorpangloss•7mo ago
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
It didn't ship in the distant past due to anti-competitive reasons but it is there now.
doctorpangloss•7mo ago
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
Terrible how? It just needs to zip and unzip and it does that fine for most users. What else do you expect for casual users? For power usurers there's 7zip or WinRar or other solutions.
> Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck?
And what stopped you from saying that? HN rules say comments should be in good faith. What you said has clearly different meaning than what you say you meant.
Dylan16807•7mo ago
And it's only because of that comment that I learned windows 11 finally improves things.
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm.
There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous.
Dylan16807•7mo ago
> HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm.
It acts kind of like a folder but tons of things don't work when you navigate into it. And it hasn't been improved in 20 years. It's bad.
It's significantly worse for a random person because stuff breaks and they don't know why. At least if you try to run an exe it asks about extracting the whole thing so that one case is less likely to blow up.
> There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous.
Just the fact that it doesn't work for any other archive format is enough to make the original comment merely sloppy wording. It's not bad faith or disingenuous. Don't be so judgemental.
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
Humor me, how popular or other non-zip formats for average Joe's uses?
I'm a paper user and can't remember the last time I encountered a non zip format.
Dylan16807•7mo ago
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
kotaKat•7mo ago
...then a brief flash as the decompress happens because it's no longer 1998 and we're not extracting 2 MB of ZIP files on a Pentium 166,
... then you get a silly "complete!" screen with a pre-filled checkbox that spawns another Windows Explorer window by default.
Eh, three clunky "wizard" screens is a bit much for a "extract here..." command.
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
jchw•7mo ago
I can't really stomach Windows 11 so I don't personally use it but my understanding is that the latest version of Windows 11 has finally integrated a better solution, implementing archive extraction based on libarchive.
rjsw•7mo ago
FirmwareBurner•7mo ago
monster_truck•7mo ago
jore•7mo ago
gertop•7mo ago
In 11 (and maybe later 10 updates) they added 7z and rar support.
OptionOfT•7mo ago
When you open a .tar.gz or a .rar that button is gone.
For those you need to do right mouse on the .tar.gz or .rar and click "Extract All...".
I miss the days when Windows' UI was consistent.
extraduder_ire•7mo ago
It's just more noticeable on 11/10 because the last four releases each have a very distinct visual style.
lousken•7mo ago
the issue is that it sucks, it's at least 10x slower than 7 zip, maybe more, showing lots of files/folders freezes the explorer gui on w10 and it only supports .zip (which could've been changed on w11, never used, never tried)
jchw•7mo ago
genocidicbunny•7mo ago
Dwedit•7mo ago
genocidicbunny•7mo ago
Dwedit•7mo ago
Suppafly•7mo ago
I'm not sure I'd tell people I did that if it were me.
zamadatix•7mo ago
Suppafly•7mo ago
TiredOfLife•7mo ago
jccalhoun•7mo ago
Suppafly•7mo ago
SomeHacker44•7mo ago