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