rsync from tar

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 12:41:07PM -0500, Todd Rinaldo wrote:
> Rsync works well for this purpose, but it would be nice if we could
> rsync to/from a tar (or other archive format) file.

It would be better to leave such things to an external tool, such as a
fuse filesystem.  A read-only one that I spotted via searching is:

    https://sourceforge.net/projects/avf

That appears to support fuse and non-fuse use cases.

As for write access, you could refer to the tar files using one or more
--compare-dest options, and have rsync write changes into a real (new)
directory structure, and then tar the result.

The final option would be to mount a compressed filesystem and use that
instead of tar files.

..wayne..