BAF, short for Basic Archive Format, is a dead-simple file archive format.
You may see it as an alternative to the Tape Archive Format (TAR) but designed for different use cases.
The main advantages of BAF are:
- Archives are tailored for random-access (e.g. seeking) ;
- Files can be added or removed without rebuilding the whole archive ;
- Renamings don't need any rebuild either
The format is also designed to be extremely simple and almost anybody can make an encoder / decoder for it. You can see the whole specifications in the docs/specs.md document.
- All item names must be made of valid UTF-8 characters