Re: Beagle handling of compressed files and man pages

[Edd Dumbill <edd usefulinc com>]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 16:29 -0500, Jon Trowbridge wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 21:45 +0200, Michael Levy wrote:
> > how to "encode" an entry name in a URI or path.
> > If we are passing paths around then we need a way to identify the
> > specific entry of a multi-file archive....I may just be showing my
> > ignorance, but I don't know how to do this. Any ideas? For Gzip and Bzip
> > the point is moot (I think), but for Zip and Tar we'll probably want
> > something. If any one has ideas, I'd gladly remove PeekablStream.cs and
> > change IndexableCompressedFile. (would something like
> > "file:///path/to/file.gz?entry=entry/path/and/file/name" do the trick in
> > your opinion ?)
> 
> Your guess is as good as mine.  I think that using a file:// Uri for
> (non-archive) gzipped and bzipped files is fine.  For zip and tar, what
> you propose seems very reasonable but they probably shouldn't start with
> file://.  Maybe:
> 
> tar://path/to/tarball.tar?entry=blah/blah/blah
> zip://path/to/zipfile.zip?entry=blah/blah/blah
> 
> We'll probably want to special-case compressed archives, and assume that
> any code that handles tar:// Uris will know how to handle
> 
> tar://path/to/compressed/tarball.tar.gz?entry=blah/blah/blah

In general, proliferating URI schemes is a bit excessive, and seems
troublesome adding one for each compression method you come across.

What you're saying is that a tarball or zip file can be a folder.  Why
bother the user with implementation detail?  Instead use

file:///path/to/tarball.tar/blah/blah/blah
file:///path/to/zipfile.zip/blah/blah/blah

This lets you keep perfectly the semantics of the / separator, and
avoids error prone special cases like "?entry="

Note also the three slashes at the start for localhost.

Per http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html:

   A file URL takes the form:

       file://<host>/<path>

   where <host> is the fully qualified domain name of the system on
   which the <path> is accessible, and <path> is a hierarchical
   directory path of the form <directory>/<directory>/.../<name>.

   ...

   As a special case, <host> can be the string "localhost" or the empty
   string; this is interpreted as `the machine from which the URL is
   being interpreted'.

-- Edd