Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!paula
From: paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.zenith.z100
Subject: Re: Banning ARC files.
Message-ID: <7758@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: 19 Sep 88 20:58:45 GMT
References: <8809161727.AA17804@sdimax2.menet>
Reply-To: paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 91

In article <8809161727.AA17804@sdimax2.menet> jrv%sdimax2@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA writes:
>
>My personal preference would be to get the SEA vs PK court decision
>reversed.  

Hear!  Hear!

>         The SIMTEL-20 archives may be fixable by standalone programs
>running in the background, but there are .ARC files on millions of
>floppy disks, too.  Converting them requires manual operations.

I'm not converting any of my ~60 floppies full of .ARC files until I
have to!

>If we must change formats, I think we should think about potential improvements.
>I would suggest improving the archive itself by:

[a 7-bit ASCII mode for archaic communication channels]

Uuencode already does this. 

[storing full pathnames]

ZOO does this.  

[allowing longer names to support other operating systems]

ZOO does this too, and runs on lots of systems.

[DES encryption]

In your archive program?  Wouldn't it be simpler to have a separate
encryption utility?


>I would also suggest improving the pack/unpack program:

[an interactive archive viewer/unpacker, sort of like the -i mode of the
Berkeley restore program]

Sounds nice.

[ability to copy an archive member to a different archive without
unpacking]

Sounds like feaping creaturism to me!

[full-screen point-and-click interface]

Yeah!

>I think now's the time to comment on these suggestions and bring
>up others so the next archive will be not only different but BETTER.
>
>                             - Jim Van Zandt
> ... ...-....1200 N81N         ............

ZOO exists, is portable, has a public format, is free, and does almost
everything I want in an archiver.  The only thing it lacks is
multi-volume capability.  It can take a list of filenames on stdin, so
if it could only write multiple floppies I could use it to backup my
hard disk.  Pdtar is also portable, public-domain, and free, but the
MSDOS implementation can't do compression.  There is a version of pdtar
that handles multiple floppies, however!

I suggest that we use ZOO.  It's better than ARC in several ways and it
already exists.  

[mild flame on]  A previous poster stated that ZOO was disqualified
because Rahul has restricted it from being distributed by services that
charge more than a certain amount per hour.  This argument is specious,
since nobody is being forced to download ZOO from an expensive service.
Another previous poster talked about the formation of a committee to
design a new non-ARC archive format.  This is foolishness, since ZOO
already does what we need, is universally and freely available, is
portable, and has a publicly documented format.  [flame off]

Obviously, I'll use whatever archive format eventually dominates, but it
seems to me that Rahul's superior archiver is being discarded simply
because of some people's emotional biases.  Seems a shame, too.

(OK, so maybe I'm all wet!  If anybody can explain what's wrong with
ZOO, or why some other archiver is better, I'm all ears.)

Paul


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul L. Allen                       | paula@boeing.com
Boeing Advanced Technology Center   | ...!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!paula