Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!ucsd!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!uunet!n3dmc!johnl
From: johnl@n3dmc.UUCP (John Limpert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Phil Katz's bad form
Message-ID: <364@n3dmc.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jun 88 12:45:22 GMT
References: <5912@megaron.arizona.edu> <4499@killer.UUCP> <1861@aecom.YU.EDU> <8151@brl-smoke.ARPA> <1282@percival.UUCP>
Reply-To: johnl@n3dmc.UUCP (John Limpert)
Organization: N3DMC, Silver Spring, Maryland
Lines: 28

In article <1282@percival.UUCP> jamesd@percival.UUCP (James Deibele) writes:
>So call it .ARP for ARchive from Phil or whatever if he wants to keep the
>default as incompatible.  I guess I can see a use for the .ARK extension,
>because it's a quicker way of saying "This SEA-standard archive is designed
>for CP/M machines"; you could have FILEDATE.ARC and FILEDATE.ARK in the same
>directory.  I agree that PKware's utilities are much faster than SEA's, but
>I wish that Phil Katz had been more respectful of the standards.

SEA was not the first to use .ARC for a file extension.  I remember using
several other file archiver programs that used .ARC, none of them were
compatible with SEA's ARC program.  The same can be said for other popular
file extensions like .LBR and .LIB.  At least PKARC was upwards compatible
with SEA's ARC.  The simplest solution would have been to add squashing
to the SEA ARC program, making it fully compatible with PKARC.  SEA had
already made many additions/modifications that obsoleted old versions of
ARC, the only difference in this case was that it wasn't done by SEA.
Since the SEA ARC program's user interface and compression algorithms
were largely derived from previous software, it is difficult to understand
the reason for the lawsuit.  It sounds like someone at SEA is suffering
from a bruised ego.  SEA, like many others before them, took the best
features of existing software, added some new ideas and wrote a program.
There is nothing wrong with that.  They shouldn't be upset if someone
does it to them.

-- 
John A. Limpert
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