Talk:Archiving

Categories
I was about to create a separate category for 'container' formats, but thought I would check here just in case someone had lumped them under compression. Which is what has happened. Having a 'non-compressed' category under the 'compression' category demonstrates the folly of this approach, I think!

I realise that zip and related formats conflate the two notions, but there are many, many container formats which aren't compressed. And there are some compression formats (LZW for example) that aren't container formats. I vote for splitting them but with appropriate cross-linking,


 * The seed for this page came from a gigantic list; the categories represent only a few minutes of sortation effort. I am strongly in favor of using actual mediawiki categories. Chronomex (talk) 05:09, 1 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I concur that there's a real benefit to begin making a Categories approach to these items, so that as we mess with the core ontology, the Categories will take over. There's some extensions to automatically make Category pages - I'll make sure that's in place and we'll have a category piece as well, which will make finding things easier. --Jason Scott (talk) 05:13, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Revisitation
A lot has changed over the course of the past month. Categories have been introduced alongside infoboxes. But this page (and its related categories) still conflates archive formats and compression formats. In general, there will be three types of formats: archive formats, compression formats, and combined archive and compression formats. (Running an archive format through a compressor is not the same as the third category.) We should probably take the opportunity to begin splitting these out somehow. Gphemsley (talk) 17:32, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Maybe the category should be "Compression and Archiving"? With separate category menus, it would be difficult to figure out where to put the combined archiving/compression formats. Dan Tobias (talk) 17:46, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
 * That's one approach to consider. But there are a number of compression formats/algorithms (including gzip and bzip2) which in and of themselves have nothing to do with archiving. I wonder if a better approach wouldn't be to group archive formats (whether are not they are compressed) separately from simple compression formats/algorithms? This would mean moving the current Compression page to Archives or Archive formats or something, and then moving that stream compression section back over the redirect to Compression. Thoughts? Gphemsley (talk) 17:54, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
 * That makes sense, I think. Archiving maybe. Dan Tobias (talk) 22:05, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Done. But now I wonder if maybe Archiving shouldn't also have a Compression subcategory? I'm not sure how we want the sub-ontology to work. (If we only have Compression as a subcategory, then the archive formats without compression would be at a higher level; they'd be leaves off the root instead of leaves off a branch.) Thoughts? Gphemsley (talk) 18:39, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh, also, somebody needs to go through all the archive formats and change their infobox from Compression to Archiving. (Does anybody have any bots set up?) Gphemsley (talk) 18:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)