| The following is a list of things I would like to see |
| done with libarchive. It's sorted roughly in priority; |
| more feasible and more often-requested items are higher |
| on the list. If you think you have time to work on any |
| of these, please let me know. |
| |
| * More compression options: Recent improvements to the |
| read bidding system and external program support should |
| make it very simple to add support for lzo, lzf, and |
| many other command-line decompression programs. |
| I've even written up a Wiki page describing how to |
| do this. |
| |
| * cpio front-end. The basic bsdcpio front-end is now |
| working. I'm looking for feedback about what additional |
| features are necessary. |
| |
| * pax front-end. Once cpio is a little more stable, I plan |
| to fork it as the basis of a pax front-end. The only really |
| tricky part will be implementing the header-editing features |
| from POSIX 2001 'pax', which will require some changes to |
| the libarchive API. |
| |
| * libarchive on Windows. libarchive mostly builds cleanly |
| on Windows and Visual Studio. Making this really clean |
| requires reworking the public API to not use dev/ino; I |
| think I know how to do this but could use advice from |
| someone knowledgable about Windows file-management APIs. |
| |
| * Linux large-file/small-file dance. libarchive always |
| builds with 64-bit off_t and stat structures; client programs |
| don't always do this. Supporting client programs built |
| with 32-bit off_t requires a little trickery. I know how |
| to do this but haven't had time to work through it. |
| |
| * bsdtar on Windows. After libarchive is working on Windows, |
| this should be much simpler. At worst, you can just disable |
| features. |
| |
| * Writing tar sparse entries. The GNU "1.0" sparse format |
| sucks a lot less than the old GNU sparse format, so I'm finally |
| dropping my objections to sparse file writing. This requires |
| extending archive_entry to support a block list, and will |
| require extensive changes to bsdtar to generate block lists. |
| The sparse read code will also need to put block lists into |
| the entry so that archive-to-archive copies preserve sparseness. |
| |
| * ISO9660 writing. Writing ISO9660 requires two passes, and |
| libarchive is a single-pass API. For ISO9660, you can hide |
| that behind a temp file, though. Collect metadata in memory, |
| append file bodies (properly padded to 2k sector boundaries) |
| to a temp file, then format the directory section and copy |
| the file data through at format close. |
| |
| * archive_read_disk: Currently, libarchive can generate a stream |
| of entries from an archive file and can feed entries to an |
| archive file or a directory. The missing corner is pulling |
| entries from a directory. With that, libarchive can provide |
| efficient bulk copy services for dir-to-dir, dir-to-archive, |
| archive-to-dir, and archive-to-archive. Right now, the |
| read-from-disk capabilities are handled in the client. |
| |
| * ISO9660 Level 3. ISO9660 Level 3 supports files over 4GB. |
| |
| * --split=<limit> option to bsdtar. This would watch the total output |
| size and begin a new archive file whenever <next file size> + |
| <total archive size> exceeded <limit>. Not as robust as |
| GNU tar's ability to split an entry across archives, but still |
| useful in many situations. |
| |
| * Filename matching extensions: ^ to anchor a pattern to the |
| beginning of the file, [!...] negated character classes, etc. |