NIC Improvements about nic

[DHowett]

I don't think it'd be worth the effort: All NIC really needed was a proper hierarchical storage mechanism that encoded permissions, and tar fits that bill rather well without too much overhead.
Now, if I start running up against the shortcomings that xar was meant to address, I might yet have to switch.

[DHowett]

Completed

• nictar
  • tar is a much more expressive format than NIC1.
  • NIC/control (in NIC1 format sans file, directory, and symlink directives)
  • NIC/control.pl (aka NICBridge): run specific tasks for a nic template inside a perl script.
• can't use ar as it does not support directories (maybe ar with directories in _control or whatever it ends up named. seems bad, but at least ar is plaintext for plain text data. that'd be cooler than tar, which of course is plaintext "except for the \0s")
• parse nicfiles before showing the list - lets us exclude non-matching targets and show NIC1 names instead of filenames

[manuw2009]

Hi,

I'm new to this. How would I convert .nic files into nic.tar ?
Trying to use a theos GUI, but it seems to recognize nic.tar only...

[theiostream]

Once you understand the NIC1 and NICTar specs (which is pretty straightforward), manual conversion is pretty easy. Just denicify.pl old NICs with the NIC1 version of it and nicify.pl with the NICTar version. You may have to do some magic with the control files though.

Still, this is weird to request, since every public NIC template uses NICTar.

Anyways, if a Theos GUI can't recognize NIC1s then it's not a Theos issue, but a Theos GUI issue (come on, why do you need a GUI when you can just type make?)

And you most definitely should not have posted this at this issue (I mistakenly have closed it thinking it was your own).

[DHowett]

As a developer, you can convert NIC1 files into NICTar files by using denicify and nicify. I kept NIC1 support in both denicify and nic.

If the GUI you're using doesn't show .nic files, it has failed - they are still fully valid and legal files.

[DHowett]

And @theiostream is correct; this is not the appropriate venue for this issue. Please don't hijack other issues.

[jhgorse]

You may find an interest in xar. Cheers.
https://code.google.com/p/xar/

[DHowett]

Thanks! I considered a couple formats, but I prefer to stick to formats supported via perl's core modules.

[jhgorse]

@DHowett, would it be worth making the perl bindings for xar to consider it? From the features perspective, does the utility of xar make sense for theos?

From a purely intuitive perspective, xar was made for OS X to address the shortcomings of the alternatives, so it would seem to fit the iOS mold fairly well.

[kirb]

Going to close considering the age (almost 10 years!), we’ve fared pretty well without these things and if we want to look into them again, I’d imagine it makes sense to re-evaluate completely and file new issues to ensure we’re meeting the needs of modern-day Theos projects.