• A tarball is an archive that bundles multiple files together. It usually refers to a .tar or .tar.gz file.
  • A tarball does not provide compression by itself. Conceptually it is close to a folder, but its advantage is representing many files and directories from a file system as one file. You could also call it a snapshot.
  • Unsurprisingly, diffing .tar.gz files is meaningless because that compares compressed files. Diffing the tarballs of two package versions ultimately means diffing the actual files distributed in those versions.