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The File Filesystem (2021)

(mgree.github.io)
346 points wegwerff | 3 comments | 30 Apr 24 17:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.651s | source
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RetroTechie ◴[30 Apr 24 20:10 UTC] No.40215710[source]▶
Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho.

Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality.

Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

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frizlab ◴[30 Apr 24 20:23 UTC] No.40215839[source]▶
Honest question: How is this useful? I don’t see any use-case where this would come in handy.
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1. crabbone ◴[01 May 24 16:45 UTC] No.40225775[source]▶
We used this in Gitlab CI. Unfortunately, the only way they deal with artifacts is by putting them in Zip files. Cache between builds would thus be stored as a Zip file. However, fully extracting it before each build would sometimes take as much, if not more time than to just build fresh. Mounting a Zip file as a filesystem allows extracting entries on-demand, at the time a file access would've been made. This was a notable speedup in our compilation process.
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2. pizzafeelsright ◴[02 May 24 13:43 UTC] No.40236205[source]▶
tar is what you're looking for, no?
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3. crabbone ◴[03 May 24 18:11 UTC] No.40250559[source]▶
It was a while ago, and I haven't used Gitlab in a few years. Maybe they've added TAR as an option since, but Zip was the only option at that time.