Libarchive Alternatives

libarchive reviews and mentions

• Tar files made in macOS generate "xattr" errors when expanded in Linux
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2026

  Per this 2018 page, GNU tar seems to work with SCHILY.* encoded xattrs, but not LIBARCHIVE.* ones:

  * https://mgorny.pl/articles/portability-of-tar-features.html#...

  * Via: https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount/issues/145

  bsdtar ≥3.7.2 apparently adds both types to its files for maximum portability:

  * https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/691/files#diff...

  AFAICT, bsdtar will default to "ustar" format, but will auto-switch to "pax" if needed.

• Jia Tan "JiaT75": Added error text to warning when untaring with bsdtar
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jul 2024

  Wild. All of these carefully inserted “seemingly innocuous” changes in the ecosystem to end up contributing to a wider exploit.

  This comment sums it up nicely with a gif: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/1609#issuecomm...

• The XZ attack and timeline
  1 project | dev.to | 17 Apr 2024

  29. October 2021 At this point Jia Tan pops up, and the first thing we see from him is an innocuous patch to the xz repository, and while a lot of people believe he started out trying his luck with another library also known as libarchive, this is not the case, I would bet it’s more of a backup looking at the dates, being that there are a few days in between as shown in this commit.

• Zip entry size unset now honors user requested compression level
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Mar 2024
• Suspicious libarchive pull request
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Mar 2024
• Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
  49 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Mar 2024

  Potentially malicious commit by same author on libarchive: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/1609

• WinRAR musste shady werden.
  3 projects | /r/de | 10 Dec 2023
• Making Amiga IFF Thumbnails Work in Linux
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Aug 2023

  Full agreement, and with the addition of xpk¹/xfd² as natural extensions to that extensibility too. I see things like xfd supporting xz¹, and I'm simultaneously amazed that it exists and happy that I don't need to do xz {,de}compression on 68k ;)

  I guess we have something similar-ish with libarchive⁴, but nobody(including me) has pushed the extra mile to get file dialogs to support random compression and decompression formats.

  Beyond OT: I didn't realise how much stuff was still going on at aminet, but I love love LOVE that people are still dropping new car sets for Geoff Crammond's F1GP.

  ¹ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xpk_User

  ² http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfdmaster

  ³ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfd_lzma.lha

  ⁴ https://www.libarchive.org/

• WinRAR zero-day exploited since April to hack trading accounts
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Aug 2023

  I don't have a preview channel install handy to check, but apparently they're using libarchive so here's the full list assuming they expose everything it supports:

  https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...

• Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 23493 for the Dev Channel
  1 project | /r/Windows11 | 29 Jun 2023

  As announced at the Build conference back in May, this build adds native support for reading additional archive file formats using the libarchive open-source project such as

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