TrueZIP 6.0 is in development
(March 6th, 2006)
This will be a major update release with support for TAR archives and much more. TrueZIP 6 will provide some exciting new features:
- A plug-in "driver" architecture for any archive type. This allows third parties to provide support for virtually any archive type, such as RAR or ARJ.
- Out-of-the-box support for TAR, TAR.GZ and TAR.BZ2 archive using the new archive "driver" architecture. As usual with TrueZIP, this will allow an application to address any entry in a TAR archive by specifying the archive as part of the path name, such as e.g. src.tar.gz/readme.html.
- Out-of-the-box support for ZIP64 archives in order to break the 4GB limitation of the current ZIP32 implementation. However, please note that in order to provide a short release cycle, this may be deferred to the release of TrueZIP 6.1 instead of TrueZIP 6.0.
- And some other goodies as well, but I don't want to promise too much yet...
The current status is that the TAR support is already implemented and working (i.e. passes all JUnit tests). The archive driver interface has yet to be refactored again in order to remove all of the ZIP32 specific legacy. A beta release is planned for next week. This release will be stable (i.e. passes all JUnit tests), but may be subject to some more refactorings.
Besides of all the good news, there is also some not-so-good-news: In order to abstract TrueZIP from ZIP32, some public API classes and interfaces had to be refactored. So if your application is not just using basic file I/O, it is likely that you will have to refactor some of your code. For this reason, TrueZIP 5.1 is and will be continued to be maintained, i.e. all bugs will be fixed and minor enhancements will be added (but no big features).
So application developers have the choice to stay with TrueZIP 5.1.X and be on the safe side in terms of bug fixes and regular maintenance or switching to TrueZIP 6 to take advantage of the support for all the new archive types.