Hig: An Evolving Project-Aware Incremental Archiving Framework for Developer Workflows

Abstrakt

Developer projects are repeatedly archived during local builds, handoffs, checkpoints, and tool-assisted workflows. Conventional archive utilities optimize an individual invocation, whereas repeated project archiving must also manage change discovery, secure reuse, bounded memory, and variable local storage behavior. This paper presents Hig, a project-aware incremental archiving framework whose current first-major-release line is v1.9.7. Hig combines an HIGV2 archive surface, project snapshots, a watcher-assisted change journal, reusable prepared objects, bounded-memory pipeline staging, and standard cryptographic primitives. It does not introduce a new compression, encryption, hash, or cryptographic algorithm. Instead, its contribution is the engineering framework that coordinates established techniques for recurring developer workflows. The paper reports an evidence-based evolution from v1.0.1 through v1.9.7, separating comparable experiments from observations collected under different I/O conditions. On a 15,330-file large developer project corpus, a v1.9.6 project archive was 57.11 MB, compared with 67.75 MB for zip and 61.33 MB for tar.gz; the first pack was 1.18 s versus 4.38 s for zip on that run. In controlled v1.9.6/v1.9.7 cold-path experiments, v1.9.7 reduced source-read worker time by 75.8% while preserving archive size and cross-version extraction compatibility. Real-project results also reveal non-stationary storage effects that preclude a blanket throughput claim. The paper documents these limits, the disclosure boundary, and a reproducible engineering-validation protocol for future releases.