RE: [office] RE: Directories in Zip packages

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

+1

Yes, I think we should define the confirming-package Zip to not include
0-length stuff, whether thought to be directories or files (although I have
a counter-example where a 0-length file if compressed has non-zero
compressed size (2 bytes, actually).

I also agree that consumers *should* be permissive for the use case you
describe.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Jolliffe [mailto:bobjolliffe@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2010 07:58
To: robert_weir@us.ibm.com
Cc: Hanssens Bart; dennis.hamilton@acm.org; David LeBlanc; Cornelis Frank;
office@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office] RE: Directories in Zip packages

[ ... ]

So I would say that an odf producer should only produce entries in the
zipfile for non-zero-length streams (this would by default also
excludes directories).  And that each of these shall be referenced in
a full document signature.

An odf consumer, when validating a signature, shall verify that the
signature references all non-zero-length entries in the package.  The
presence of other zipentries in the package could be either ignored or
treated as an error.  Following Postel, I am leaning towards the more
permissive approach.  The benefit of simply ignoring being that it
would allow naive general purpose zip tools to produce valid odf
files, even though they would likely be violating the recommendation
above regarding odf producers.  I think this is reasonable given the
various toolchains people might construct which might involve an
eventual packaging stage using pkzip or something similar.

[ ... ]