Comment by dwattttt
15 days ago
This seems like something that shouldn't be the container formats responsibility. You can record arbitrary metadata and put it in a file in the container, so it's trivial to layer on top.
On the other hand, tie the container structure to your OS metadata structure, and your (hopefully good) container format is now stuck with portability issues between other OSes that don't have the same metadata layout, as well as your own OS in the past & future.
What is a container then?
Just an id,blob format?
The purpose of tar (or competitors) is to serialize files and their metadata.
Tar is not the pinnacle of "containers"; it has age and ubiquity, and that's about it at this point.
Tar's purpose was to serialise files and metadata in 1979, accounting for tape foibles such as fixed or variable data block size.