Re: [xwiki-dev] .xar Extension NOT Used Properly

Hi Jeremi, I'm +1 on my side but as you voted -1 we'll need to convince you to change your vote ;-) Let me give it a try below... On Feb 3, 2007, at 9:41 AM, jeremi joslin wrote: * JAR is an archive format. It can be used for lots of different things. There are even software that use JARs for their installation. * I really believe that in the future our applications will not be made only of XML files but will also contain other libraries (jar files) and java classes. For example imagine the IRC bot application. There are some xwiki pages but we also need the picoirc jar. We'll need to bundle all that together. * XWiki is a Java application so all users are familiar with the JAR format. Of course we can use the XAR format for that. XAR looks nice because there's XWiki inside but there's a cost of inventing a new archive format: * It needs to be described * There needs to be tools for it (or people need to rename it to zip...). BTW if it's a zip we might as well name it zip... The problem with Zip is that it does not support meta data information such as the jar format does. And we need these... And there are APIs to get these metadata so we don't have to reimplement all the code (as we've done for the package.xml file). * It makes it difficult for the build (this is the same argument as above with tools) as all the existing plugins do not understand the XAR format so we have to reinvent all the tools... This is why I had to implement the xar handler and the xar plugin in our repository. It would make it much easier if it were an existing format such as JAR. I think it would be much better to use an existing format (which we do except we're using Zip instead of JAR), already documented rather than invent a new one. There's no point in us hiding the underlying format we use by changing the extension. We might as well use that format's extension... Some people have thrown nuclear bombs in the past. Is that a good reason for others to do it? Probably not. It's not because people are doing bad things that we have to follow them ;-) Thanks -Vincent ___________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Mail réinvente le mail ! Découvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface révolutionnaire. http://fr.mail.yahoo.com -- You receive this message as a subscriber of the xwiki-dev(a)objectweb.org mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:xwiki-dev-unsubscribe@objectweb.org For general help: mailto:sympa@objectweb.org?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws