tarmount: mounts tar/tar.gz archives
This is a call for alpha testers...
I have written a package called tarmount, which allows users to mount
tar and compressed tar archives as a disk partition. For instance,
given an archive test1.tar.gz, you can mount it using
tarmount test1.tar.gz
The mountpoint and unmounting rules are automatically controlled by the
tarmount program, in a safe and multi-user way.
Note that the program does NOT fully expand the archive on disk, but mearly
gives the impression that the archive is expanded. The data in the archive
is expanded dynamically on demand only for the read block request... thus
you can have huge compressed tar archives and still treat them as a disk
partition. Clever hu?
In fact the archive is writable too, and presents its data to the system
as if it was a standard (well, old standard) ext2 filesystem. You can
even fsck it! Currently the writes to the partition are silently discarded
when the partition is unmounted, but eventually I hope to create either
a compressed form of the changes or a diff.gz file. It uses nbd (network
block devices) to produce the parition device, and runs completely in
userspace.
Anyway, people who are interested in testing this package for me
should get in touch. I would have liked to just send it to master, but
as it is alpha I am wondering if people would appreciate it appearing
in potato?
Here is the package description... does anyone thing that such a program
is useful?
G.
Description: mount a (compressed) tar archive as a partition
I have always wanted to be able to mount a .tar file as a partition in
Linux, and so I wrote this package to do it... It mounts:
o straight tar archives (extension .tar)
o gziped tar archives (extensions .tar.gz and .tgz)
as a directory, without uncompressing the archive first.
.
This is experimental, and the first alpha release of this package.
.
It makes use of gzip dynamically to uncompress requested data on the fly.
It uses nbd (network block devices), and operates the tar partition completely
in userspace. To the system, the archive appears as a ext2 filesystem.
You can even run fsck on the partition...
.
The archive is also writable, but for this version all writes are lost when
tarmount shuts down. Enjoy...
--
Gordon Russell
http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~gor
PGP Public Key - http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~gor/pgpkey.txt
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