[Debburn-devel] Grafting tar files?

[David Kastrup]

Hi,

there exists a TeXlive live DVD.  One can install this live DVD to
harddisk.  This implies copying a lot of small files in lots of
separate directories from the live system to the disk, a quite slow
operation because of many head movements.

Installation would be much faster when done from a tar archive placed
linearly on disk.  Now a tar archive contains one block (512b) of
header data before the corresponding file blocks.  So the actual file
data is on blocks of its own, and one could create directory entries
pointing to them.

In that manner one would have a linearly readable tar file which is
reasonably fast for installation, and "pseudounpacked" files which can
be used for a live system.

Would it be feasible to create a pseudo untar command working on disk
images which would create information as if the tar file had actually
been unpacked at a suitable place?

-- 
David Kastrup