> Why not use the old standard "tar" ?  Are you choosing zip because
> you can delete the compressed entries without having to uncompress the
> entire stream to get at them?

No, I'm wanting to use zip because it provides random access to
compressed data.  Tar interleaves metadata and data and it *sucks* for
trying to grab all files which match a certain pattern criteria.
You're forced to traverse the entire file each time or traverse it
once and build your own shadow directory structure - either way, it's
a lot of extra work for no other gain but the "comfort" of using a
familiar data format.  This shortcoming is also why the current
package tools unpack everything into a temporary directory before
moving only those components which are desired into place, and that
blows blows blows.  A more reasonable package data format than gzip'd
tar files would eliminate a lot of the hair on this problem.

				Jordan