Re: RFP: CompoundStorage document

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 07:47:40PM +0200, Dietmar Maurer wrote:
> 
> I cant see why someone want to use tar files to store compound
> documents. We have special formats (OLE2/libefs) which do a much better
> job for compound documents (incremental save, encryption, compression,
> transactions).

1) libefs was not in the running.  It might have lots of useful
   features as design goals, but there are no readily available
   tools to manipulate it, and it has not seen much testing.  Adding
   yet another structured file format to the mix is just not a good
   idea.

2) OLE2 this was considered.  There are lots of tools for
   manipulating it but it has no native support for encryption or
   compression, and frankly our ole export needs ... love.  To base
   our apps on a format that is that ugly seems questionable.

The result was zip.  I doubt it was anyones first choice.  However,
it works, and more or less supports the things we need to get done.
Once OO selected it, the result was pretty clear.  Perfection is the
enemy of the good.  If we sit and contemplate our navels for years
producing yet another file format we're not likely to make things
any clearer.