Can we use the index to mount the archive?

[Redsandro]

So this index.. can we use it for neat tricks like mounting the archive (read-only) without extracting everything first?

For example to use FreeFileSync or some other dir-diff tool?

[vasi]

You can mount the uncompressed content with lzopfs: https://github.com/vasi/lzopfs

You can't mount a tarball from the index though, it only contains the filename. Other metadata that stat() needs—directory sizes, symlink targets, etc—would require decompression, and so would load really slowly.

[Redsandro]

Thank you for the details. I guess the closest thing is to extract to /tmp/ and sync from there. :)