Tar and Gzip support in Dart

[nex3]

We need some way of interacting with gzipped files and tar files that's better than shelling out to the "tar" executable. Issue #3798 is one possible way of doing this.

This is currently blocking Windows support for Pub.

[iposva-google]

As far as I can tell, everything that you need to implement this is there.

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Set owner to @nex3.

[DartBot]

This comment was originally written by george.moscho...@gmail.com

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Could this be used to gzip HTTP responses and WebSocket messages?

[nex3]

Yes.

[DartBot]

This comment was originally written by kaisellgren@gmail.com

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I'm working on Zlib package. I plan on publishing the code soon after I've got it in a reasonable state. I'll keep you posted.

[DartBot]

This comment was originally written by george.moscho...@gmail.com

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Great!

[nex3]

Kai, I notice you have a Zip library up on Pub already (http://pub.dartlang.org/packages/zip). Is this what you're referring to, or are you working on a separate library that supports gzip? Zip itself won't work for HTTP compression.

[DartBot]

This comment was originally written by kaisellgren@gmail.com

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Zip is a container format, much like Tar. Zip does not compress itself. Instead, Zip specifies a compression algorithm to use (e.g. DEFLATE) and this algorithm compresses the data that Zip simply stores.

That said, I'm working on a Zlib package, which implements the Zlib library. I will use it for my Zip library in the future as well. They are two different things. The Zlib package can be used for HTTP compression, to implement .docx generator (which I've been prototyping), or even implement Git in Dart which I've also been planning to do :)

So, no, I'm not referring to the Zip package. My Zlib code is still private. The deflation works 95%, corrupting some random bytes. So, some work left there ;)

[lrhn]

Removed Type-Defect label.
Added Type-Enhancement label.

[lrhn]

I'm all for having tar and gzip support as packages (I'm all for supporting everything with packages), but apart from what we already use, we don't currently plan to add those packages ourselves.
Pub packages are welcome :)

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Added NotPlanned label.