zfec VS pixz

We used reflex-frp, so our app was a webview that worked on localhost and Android. The docs say it also works on iOS but we don't have an iPhone.

The process was learning Functional Reactive Programming, then learning reflex-frp, then getting a contract with obsidian (creators of reflex) for one hour a week where we could ask questions.

( https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform )

We had a grant requirement to create a phone client for Tahoe-LAFS, a Python application with a bunch of dependencies, including ZFEC, a forward error correction library.

( https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/ )

( https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec/ )

We needed bug for bug compatibility with the Python codebase, so I ran Tahoe on localhost and tested the Haskell client against the Python server. We used servant to build the API, since it builds both client and server side from the same description.

( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant )

I disagree with the premise of the article. Archive formats are all inadequate for long-term resilience and making them adequate would be a violation of the “do one thing and do it right” principle.

To support resilience, you don’t need an alternative to xz, you need hashes and forward error correction. Specifically, compress your file using xz for high compression ratio, optionally encrypt it, then take a SHA-256 hash to be used for detecting errors, then generate parity files using PAR[1] or zfec[2] to correct errors.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Parchive

[2] https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec

That's really confusing since `pixz` exists and its "pixie" pronunciation actually works

https://github.com/vasi/pixz

pixz (https://github.com/vasi/pixz) is a nice parallel xz that additionally creates an index of tar files so you can decompress individual files. I wonder if dpkg could be extended to do something similar.

There's pixz, which indexes the tarball, allowing listing/extracting individual paths without decompressing the whole thing.

Also relevant is pixz [1] which can do parallel LZMA/XZ decompression as well as tar file indexing.

[1] https://github.com/vasi/pixz

Yes, it's as easy as installing pixz with symlinks pointing to xz (I think Debian even does this automatically as part of its post-installation scripts).

pixz - Parallel, indexed xz compressor. BSD-2-Clause

Not quite what you're asking, but if you're a 7-Zip fan and on Linux, you might be interested in pixz.