Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!uunet!cme-durer!brickman
From: brickman@cme-durer.ARPA (Jonathan E. Brickman)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: A Dumb Idea
Message-ID: <581@rtg.cme-durer.ARPA>
Date: 13 Aug 88 21:48:26 GMT
References: <17362@gatech.edu>
Reply-To: brickman@rtg (Jonathan E. Brickman)
Organization: The National Bureau of Standards
Lines: 21

In article <17362@gatech.edu> jkg@gatech.UUCP (Jim Greenlee) writes:
>In reading the discussion about ARC vs. PK{ARC|PAK} vs. ZOO, a thought occurred
>to me that I have never seen addressed in this newsgroup:
>
>	What exactly is it that people have against compressed tar files?
>
>Using compress and tar would seem to solve a lot of compatibility problems
>since it is already an established "standard" in many environments (am I
>pre-supposing again? :-). Does anybody have any thoughts on this, or is it
>just "a dumb idea"?
>
>						Jim Greenlee

Compressed tar files are reasonably standard on Unix machines, but on no
other.  Sure, compression and tar programs for MS-DOS machines exist, but
the examples I've seen have all been cumbersome and slow.  Just in case you
didn't realize it, the PKARC format was extremely compact (consistently
around 50% compression), and extremely fast (it would unpack a 100,000 byte
file faster than the copy command would copy it).  I'll take that kind of
speed and consistency, thank you very much, over any kind of tradition.
||Jonathan E. Brickman