Tarball?

What the hell is the point of having .tar.gz?  Is it double compression?  Does source code REALLY need that much?

>>19
>It's also better to archive and compress in the same step...

That's true for the reasons you mentioned, but tarballs compress better because all the data is compressed as a single unit, so that common parts of different files can be encoded. I supposed it would be possible to develop a compression and archiving format that would compress all files against each other, but still keep the list of files separate so that they could be easily extracted singularly, but I don't know of such a format.