Disarchive vs pristine-tar

On 30/06/26 at 13:59 +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
> Why pristine-tar, what is your goal?  Yes, it is known to be clunky,
> because it need to redo all compression and assembling stuff, in all the
> compression version variants.

FWIW, in another context, I learned about Disarchive
(https://ngyro.com/software/disarchive.html) which does approximately
the same thing as pristine-tar. It originates and is mainly used in the
GUIX community.

From
https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/swh/devel/swh-model/-/work_items/2430#note_23708:

> This is similar to what pristine-tar does, but our goal is to make the
> metadata transparent and readable.  Where pristine-tar relies on
> binary deltas to avoid having to interpret the metadata, we strive to
> interpret the metadata and store it in a structured way.  This makes
> the resulting database a lot nicer, since it clearly describes the
> parts of the source code archive not captured by Software Heritage.
> Of course, this comes at a price, which is development effort.  So far
> it is coming along nicely, but we only support Gzip and tarballs.
> Judging by the pristine-tar source code, adding bzip2 and XZ support
> should be pretty easy.

Lucas