Pack to/unpack from folders instead of tars

[wmiles-sgl]

Would you consider a patch to pack to and unpack from folders without creating a tar file? I'm trying to manage updates to large environments (tar file is multiple GB) for systems in remote areas with poor network connectivity, which must then be delivered to air-gapped machines. In our use case, frequently the actual change to the environment is small - one or two packages - which makes it practical to update a previously expanded pack via tools like rsync. Allowing an option to skip the tar step would make installation much easier for us as we wouldn't have to re-tar the environment sources first.

[pavelzw]

I understand the use case and agree it makes sense. I'm thinking a bit about other ways to solve this issue.
An alternative could be stdout/stdin support, then you could also solve your task with the following:

pixi-pack -o - | tar -x -C environment-dir
tar -cf - environment-dir | pixi-unpack -

WDYT about this alternative approach?

[wmiles-sgl]

Can I have both? ;)

Supporting stdio makes sense for a lot of cases - piping right to or from curl is the first that comes to mind. Still, for the unpack case it's a bit of a "worst of both worlds" solution - we have to read the packages from the filesystem to build them in to a tar, then un-tar them back out to the filesystem somewhere else to validate and install from. Alas we don't have tmpfs on all platforms (Windows)!

[wmiles-sgl]

Alas we don't have tmpfs on all platforms (Windows)!

.. Actually, it also creates a distribution challenge for the tar binary on Windows too.

[pavelzw]

then let's add both 👍🏻

[pavelzw]

happy to accept PRs :)

[pavelzw]

maybe the directory using something like pixi-pack --no-tar and pixi-unpack --no-tar my-environment-dir