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The difference between a 'neotar' effort and a 'neovim' effort is that for 'neotar', you'd have to be using it also for me to send you a neotar file. It may seem like a small thing, but this is a major impediment to the adoption of new formats. (Corollary is that neotar would have to offer major improvements to get people to buy in.)

> A single unified directory structure does seem like a desirable feature,

It can make it more difficult to incrementally stream out an archive, so it's not a complete win.

It looks like several have tried, including the Library of Congress: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_archive_format...

Would that be different than ZIP then?

But then you can't replace "tar.bz2" or "tar.gz" with "<something else>.gz" since ZIP does both container and compression.

Sure you can. Nothing prevents you from zipping something with compression turned off and then running bz2 on the result.