AIP packaging and compression
Requirements
- Separate compression and packaging functions
- Ubiquitous format
- Processing time
- Cross-platform tool availability for unpacking
- Tools used most by other repositories
- Must be able to include empty directories (excludes using zip?)
- File date tags preserved
- LZMA is the preffered compression algorithm
See Issue 928 and Issue 927
Notes On Specific Formats
ZIP
info from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_%28file_format%29 The maximum size for both the archive file and the individual files inside it is 4,294,967,295 bytes (232−1 bytes, or 4 GiB) for standard ZIP, and 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 bytes (264−1 bytes, or 16 EiB) for ZIP64.
ZIP 64
The original zip format had a 4 GiB limit on various things (uncompressed size of a file, compressed size of a file and total size of the archive), as well as a limit of 65535 entries in a zip archive. In version 4.5 of the specification (which is not the same as v4.5 of any particular tool), PKWARE introduced the "ZIP64" format extensions to get around these limitations, increasing the limitation to 16 EiB (264 bytes).
The File Explorer in Windows XP does not support ZIP64, but the Explorer in Windows Vista does. Likewise, some libraries, such as DotNetZip and IO::Compress::Zip in Perl, support ZIP64. Java's built-in java.util.zip does support ZIP64 from version Java 7.[29]