> ~99% of Linux users and administrators have never seen a digital tape drive
I would question this assertion. Some of us have been doing this a while, you know.
> Do we really need
Probably not.
> no benefit
Benefits include being able to use the same dictionary across the whole archive, being able to leverage multiple improvements in multiple outside compression programs, backwards compatibility going back decades, and the ability to use a tool that's standard not just on Linux but BSD, macOS, Solaris, and any POSIX compliant system.
> ultimate idiosyncrasy of of Linux
Are you certain that's not systemd? Or the way ptys are handled? Or its sound and video systems? Or the /proc file system? Or devd? Maybe the multiple families of different incompatible package managers? I mean tar isn't originally from Linux or even GNU. It sure beat shar files.
If you want your files inside your archive compressed before being added to the file, you can do that too with tar, but other tools do it for you. You're absolutely free to use those other tools.
Yes, because that's the only famous oddity which is actually annoying (sound and video systems just work and do everything a user might want of them) and has no real reason to exist on a today computer.
> If you want your files inside your archive compressed before being added to the file
No, I want to see a list of files inside without decompressing anything and without reading the whole archive.
Being able to extract a particular file could be a very nice bonus - using the same dictionary for all of them doesn't require making this impossible.
I would question this assertion. Some of us have been doing this a while, you know.
> Do we really need
Probably not.
> no benefit
Benefits include being able to use the same dictionary across the whole archive, being able to leverage multiple improvements in multiple outside compression programs, backwards compatibility going back decades, and the ability to use a tool that's standard not just on Linux but BSD, macOS, Solaris, and any POSIX compliant system.
> ultimate idiosyncrasy of of Linux
Are you certain that's not systemd? Or the way ptys are handled? Or its sound and video systems? Or the /proc file system? Or devd? Maybe the multiple families of different incompatible package managers? I mean tar isn't originally from Linux or even GNU. It sure beat shar files.
If you want your files inside your archive compressed before being added to the file, you can do that too with tar, but other tools do it for you. You're absolutely free to use those other tools.