TAR archives w/ extended headers have limited Windows compatibility

[nathonius]

Current Behavior

When downloading multiple files via the Flood GUI, they are helpfully compressed into a .tar archive. However, the archive uses extended pax headers which have limited compatibility with Windows, particularly with 7zip.

Possible Solution

Use some other compression scheme or disable extended headers.

Context

Usually I just use FileZilla if I need to transfer files from my server to my local machine, but on occasion I'm on a computer without that set up. Trying to extract a downloaded archive usually ends in failure.

Your Environment

Win 10 on the receiving end. The server running Flood is on Ubuntu 16.04.3, node v6.9.5.

• Version used:
  • Version (stable release): v1.0.0
  • Commit ID (development release): d5dc412e20801fbfbf15484fe3ae7e8dc4d3170a

[noraj]

related issue https://github.com/jfurrow/flood/issues/579

[noraj]

@OfficerHalf Can you edit your issue and add this part of the issue template:

## Your Environment
<!--- Include as many relevant details about the environment you experienced the bug in -->
* Version used:
  + Version (stable release) `git --no-pager tag`
  + Commit ID (development release) `git --no-pager log -1`

[noraj]

@OfficerHalf Can you provide the error message you get from 7zip please?

[nathonius]

Sorry, to clarify, there is no error message. Instead of the correct files, there are a number of files called PaxHeader (which 7zip will then name PaxHeader_1, PaxHeader_2, etc). 7zip just doesn't support that format, at least as of 2016: https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/f58b3570/

I don't think #579 is related.

This is probably a problem with 7zip more than anything, but it's a fairly common piece of software for interacting with non-zip archives on Windows.

[noraj]

#579 is relating because:

Feature request: I suggest to support zip or rar or 7z in addition of tar.

So if you have others choices than tar, for example zip, there will no longer be any problem. So fixing #579 will fix this issue too.

[nathonius]

Ahh, okay. Works for me. 👍

[dcousens]

You can switch to .zip from .tar by using zip-stream.

It is almost a 1:1 drop in, with s/finalize/finish and some different entry header syntax.

[dcousens]

If this is wanted, I am happy to implement it.

[noraj]

@dcousens Don't replace tar by zip but add zip as an additional option please.