I don’t think it’s this simple: you can still produce observable differentials with a single parser by using different options within that parser in different places. The ZIP format itself affords ample opportunities for that.
I don’t think it’s this simple: you can still produce observable differentials with a single parser by using different options within that parser in different places. The ZIP format itself affords ample opportunities for that.
The settings are at encode time. For two readers the results should be unambiguous.
There are plenty of decode-time knobs, even within a single ZIP parser. Here are just a few you could set while using libzip[1].
[1]: https://libzip.org/documentation/zip_open.html#DESCRIPTION
That’s not a lot of settings, and that’s libzib, which is not zlib.
Differentials are oracular; you only need one bit. And I’m not claiming it’s in zlib, since zlib isn’t a ZIP library. TFA here is about ZIP differentials, not differentials in DEFLATE stream parsers.