On 03/12/2012, at 6:33 AM, Alexander Voitenko <tarmik@meta.ua> wrote:
Does it provide any benefits compared to mounting a loop device and working with it through traditional file system interfaces? It seems odd to have a library duplicating file system operations.
First of all, compound files are portable. You can use the same data, in the same compound files within different operating systems, not limited to Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
Please note, that both Unix-like systems and Windows struggling with limit of loop devices http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CDServer-HOWTO/addloops.html [Linux] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1944877/maximum-number-of-drives-in-windo... [Windows]
But with a such library you can simultaneously read and write thousands(millions?) of such files without restrictions from the system side. Library can be linked statically and only thing that you will require to access such file - to launch your application and not necessarily written in C++, because already exist analogous libraries in Java http://poi.apache.org and C# http://openmcdf.sourceforge.net worlds.
Also, if I want to use lot of different compound files with my data within my application, it is to weird mount and unmount devices from the runtime and also require super-user privileges.
Please do not think about compound files only as file system replacement. Imagine software that can produce some documents. Such documents use binary format and have very complex internal structure, so such structure can be represented as file system where some logical parts are grouped in folders and files.
Example of such software that really uses compound files: http://www.corel.com/corel with it .CDX format http://www.amwa.tv/ with it .AWM file format and exist some others, but not so famous.
Of course lot of Microsoft applications use them, but I don't want mention them by religious reasons ;-)
User of such applications even can not know that internal representation of his documents is an entire file system.
In my usual work I deal with compound files like with some sort of archives. Store hundreds of them on my hard drive, often copy, rename, move or zip them and send via e-mail.
Regards, Alexander Voitenko.
I guess you can add to your examples tar. zip, iso as well and these should be accessible at the user level without super/root mount.
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