[kwlug-disc] So why not tar -cf tarball.tar a.xz b.xz c.xz, instead of tar -cJf tarball.tar.xz a b c ?

[William Park]

On Sat, Nov 05, 2016 at 12:33:19AM -0400, B.S. wrote:
> The other premise of this conversation, though, is the ability to have
> confidence in a file within a tar at any point in time - integrity
> confirmation being inherent to the compress process would be an
> advantage of tar'ring zips over zipping tars.

You're talking about just packing files into tarball.  But, tarball can
contain other things, eg. directory, symlink, hardlink, char/block
device (in the old days), including other tarballs and compressed files.
Your proposal won't work in vast majority of use cases for tar.  Tar is
wrong tool for wrong job.  If you want zip behaviour, then use zipfile.
-- 
William