savior

savior is an optimistic attempt at providing an abstract layer over various compression formats (like deflate, gzip, bzip2) and archive formats (like zip, tar, etc.) all while providing reasonably good save/resume support.

Concepts

There are two main interfaces in savior: Sources and Extractors.

Sources

A savior.Source represents a data stream that can be read from start to end.

For example, a source might be:

• An HTTP(S) resource on a server
• A file on disk
• A buffer in memory
• Another source being decompressed from FLATE, gzip, or bzip2

savior ships with seeksource, which covers the former (in combination with htfs), and flatesource, gzipsource, bzip2source, which cover the latter.

A source's size doesn't need to be known in advance, although sources can optionally implement a Progress() method that returns a float64 in [0,1] — indicating how much of the stream has been consumed.

Random access is not required of sources, but saving and resuming is.

Before using a source, the Resume() method should always be called:

• If it's a fresh source, a nil checkpoint should be passed to Resume. This indicates "start from the beginning"
• If we're resuming mid-stream, a *SourceCheckpoint is passed. The source shall then try to resume using that checkpoint information. Whether it fails or not, the offset it returns should be valid. (TL;DR if it fails, just return a 0 offset)

*SourceCheckpoint are typically saved to non-volatile storage - the test suite ensures that they can be encoded/decoded via encoding/gob.

Decompressing sources like flatesource and bzip2source can typically only checkpoint on a block boundary. For that reason, it's legal for sources to return a nil *SourceCheckpoint from the Save() method. It just means that if you stop reading there and resume later, it'll start over from the beginning.

To account for the fact that sources may save an earlier position than you needed, the DiscardByRead function is exposed, letting you advance by a number of bytes to resume reading exactly where you needed.

Note: flatesource, gzipsource and bzip2source are all implemented on top of forks of golang's flate, gzip and bzip2 extractors, which can be found at itchio/kompress

Extractors

Extractors abstract over archive formats, like .tar and .zip, which may contain multiple entries (directories, files, symlinks).

It's not easy to find a common interface between those, since the .zip format knows about all entries and their sizes in advance, whereas the .tar format has no dictionary, entries are discovered one by one as the archive is extracted.

Extractors all have their own, specific New() method, taking whatever arguments they need to read and extract an archive.

However, they share a few common methods:

• Resume asks an extractor to start work, either from scratch or from a checkpoint. It returns an ExtractorResult, which contains a list of *Entry - all extractors are able to return the complete contents of the archive once it is fully extracted.
• SetSaveConsumer sets a SaveConsumer for the extractor, which it'll use whenever it's ready to save (and SaveConsumer.ShouldSave returns true). Extractor state are saved as *ExtractorCheckpoint, which are guaranteed to be encodable via encoding/gob. SaveConsumer implementations can also stop decompression by returning AfterSaveStop from Save().
• SetConsumer sets a *state.Consumer for the extractor, which it'll use to send log messages and emit progress info (a float64 in a [0,1] range).
• Features returns the set of features supported by an extractor, including how good its resume support is (non-existent, between entries, or mid-entries), whether it supports preallocation, etc.

Extractors can use sources internally, for example:

• A gzipsource can be passed to tarextractor to extract a .tar.gz file. The tarextractor will checkpoint any underlying source, so it doesn't need to know that the whole tar is in fact read from a gzip stream.
• The zipextractor will use a flatesource for entries compressed with the Deflate method - this allows it to checkpoint mid-entry.

Note: tarextractor and zipextractor are implemented on top of forks of golang's zip and tar archive handlers, which can be found at itchio/arkive.

Note: extractors are not responsible for closing sinks - the sinks are created and closed by the caller itself.

Sinks

A Sink is typically what an extractor extracts "to". In the simplest case, it's a FolderSink, which writes directly to the filesystem. However, other implementations exist, such as checker.Sink, used in test to extract in-memory and validate the decompressed data against a reference set.

FolderSink is opinionated — in particular, it:

• Writes symlinks as text files on Windows
  • Many versions of Windows support junctions, but they have different semantics, so they're not used
  • Many versions of Windows support actual symlinks, but they require Administrator privileges to create, so they're not used
  • Recent builds of Windows 10 support creating symlinks without Administrator privileges, but that's hardly the common denominator, so they're not used
  • Writing symlinks as text files with the os.SymlinkMode permission matches the way they're stored in .zip files, or various *nix filesystems
• Always creates necessary parent folders (with 0755)
  • If GetWriter() is called for a file entry with CanonicalPath a/b/c, the a/ and a/b/ folders will be created
• Does whatever it take to make sure the filesystem entry is of the right type
  • If GetWriter() is called for a file entry with CanonicalPath plugin, but plugin is currently a folder or symlink on disk, it will be removed first and re-created as a file
• Adjusts permissions so that they're at least 0644 (or more permissive). This avoids creating files which we don't have permission to erase or overwrite later.
• Truncates file to entry.UncompressedSize when Preallocate() is called, but not when GetWriter() is called, so that archive formats which have a zero UncompressedSize still work when resuming mid-entry.

License

savior is released under the MIT license, see the LICENSE file in this repository.