I'm working on some extensions to the Backup and Import facilities which will support long-term archiving of courses. Need to support very large archive files into the multiple GB range as these are not uncommon in my installation. Efficient extraction of meta-data from archived courses is a requirement. Since the data is in a single file "moodle.xml", I need to extract that single file efficiently. While this is a single use-case, I think that support for specific file extraction would be generally useful.

I can send code which supports extraction of a single file from a ZIP archive, if there is interest. I am a relative newbie to Moodle development, so am not sure if this is the best way to offer code. Will follow suggestions.

Also, I see the the Backup and Import facilities are still using the legacy ZIP handling code. I would be interested in going through this code and converting it to use Packer.