- Piping is really easy and it will get added to Pack. It is matter of time, until these features get added as they will be added based on popularity and piping is not that popular for most people. But I get you and I will add it for you.
- Metadata is not stored in Pack. I don’t want the metadata of my machine attached to a file. It’s a never-ending nightmare to match source and destination OS metadata. There will always be something missing, and Pack tends to get everything perfect or nothing. Storing metadata adds extra weight that most users don’t care about and complicates the ability to store other types of data alongside files. It may get added as an option in the future if many people need it.
- Pack uses Zstandard under the hood. Great compression speed and ratio. In my opinion, it is the leading algorithm in the field and makes it a proper choice to use instead of DEFLATE, used in ZIP or GZIP.
- At this point you are telling tar features. tar is not random access, Pack is. As an example, if I want to extract just a .c file from the whole codebase of Linux, it can be done (on my machine) in 30 ms, compared to near 500 ms for WinRAR or 2500 ms for tar.gz. And it will just worsen when you count encryption. For now, Pack encryption is not public, but when it is, you can access a file in a locked Pack file in a matter of milliseconds rather than seconds.