[physfs] What are the real benefits of PhysFS ?

[Daniel Aquino]

As I sit here I'm wondering what the benefits really are for putting
in the work needed to get physfs into a game...

I obviously know that I could provide updates as zip's that could
easily be rolled back.

The user can also easily override any file by adding his own to the
write folder.

You could specify paths to other zips/directories on the cli and it
all just flows there is no need to point at 1 physical directory and
then glue it all all together your self...

But beyond that what is the benefits ?

I was trying to reduce the complexity of rolling out version with
multiple files... Previously I use to just push a new exe and it was
simple to click on the exe you wanted to launch... Now that I have lua
and other dll's in the project it's a multi file update that
overwrites previous entries which looses the ability to pick the
version you want to play in...   So I was figuring I could come up
with a small boot strapper that would load up a bunch of locations
using physfs, present a list of exe's to the end user, then extract it
and launch it... Then the concept would be that the exe knows (perhaps
based on date strings in the file names) which updates came previous
to it self and doesn't load up any new ones...  This way updates could
come in a zip and you can still play multiple versions...

Any ideas?