Antipattern
Causes:
Driving Forces:
- Windows has historically had poor archiving libraries.
- Littering the filesystem with hundreds of tiny files is not really a good idea.
- ZIP imposes both structure and compression, which may not be what you want.
- The tried-and-true UNIX archive formats usually have odd issues on Windows and aren't seekable if compressed.
- Insufficient filesystem support for metadata other than a couple of dates and a few flags.
Description:
A custom written file format for storing other files.
Examples:
Most videogames.
Variants:
- The renamed zip file. (docx, new fla, swc, xlsx)
- This is not actually a bad idea -- document should be one file so it's not split by copying.
- Sometimes happens recursively.
Avoiding the antipattern:
Littering the filesystem with hundreds of tiny files is not really a good idea
This really depends greatly on the filesystem. As noted in
InterNetNews: Usenet Transport for Internet Sites, by Rich Salz, (
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sa92/salz.pdf) it depends greatly on how you operate on the filesystem, and to some extent on the filesystem design. There are now many choices for filesystems that are optimized for rapid open/read/close of many tiny files.
Yeah, but the OS and Applications filesystem (remember most examples are Windows) isn't that.
CategoryAntiPattern CategoryDevelopmentAntiPattern