Nigel Stewart wrote:

> As a result of some discussion on the IMP
> technical discussion list, there has been
> some preliminary investigation into
> supporting TAR archives from POV.
>
>

>
> Portability of JAR
> -------------------
>
> JAR is portable in the sense that it works on any
> Java supported platform.  TAR is portable in the
> sense that things like WINZIP support it.  My
> impression is that the average raytracer is going
> to be equally unfamiliar with TAR and JAR.
>
> If compression is appropriate to the application,
> let's use JAR.  However, I do not think there
> will be a good return on the investment of time
> and energy.
>
> Perhaps there is someone from the broader
> POV community who would do the work on
> zlib-based compression.  Would anyone
> object to making a report to pov.programming?

Just to help clarify things a little, JAR files are mainly just ZIP files
that are constrained not to use the patented compression. They only use the
zlib compression (which happens to be included in POV-Ray already). Thus any
JAR file is a valid ZIP file, and can be created and accessed with standard
tools.

To further help things, although there is no RFC or such on .ZIP files, but
PKWare does have an application note describing the format.

See http://www.pkware.com/appnote.html

Just use that along with the info on the JAR format itself:
http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/docs/guide/jar/index.html

One issue to note is the manifest file that is optionally present.

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