Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: SIMTEL20 to ban ARC files
Keywords: lzw, atob/btoa, 7 bit pure
Message-ID: <2054@looking.UUCP>
Date: 20 Sep 88 17:33:41 GMT
References:   <6630@ihlpl.ATT.COM> <2736@uoregon.uoregon.edu> <8475@smoke.ARPA> <2594@csccat.UUCP> <424@pigs.UUCP>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 25

The fact is that for the net compression is not desirable.  It clouds the
issue, sometimes *increases* transmission time, and just makes postings
harder to deal with.

I would suggest we use an existing format like "cpio" to do archiving.
Writing a decode only cpio program should be fairly trivial.  Cpio supports
all sorts of file info, directories and links.  It is well known, already
comes standard with many Unix machines, and is part of Posix, as I
understand it.

There are also quality non-pd CPIO programs out there, for those that want
them.

I would support TAR if it didn't put all files on block boundaries, which
can be wasteful.

Or even a slightly modified "par." (par is a PD archiver that was posted to
the net a while ago.  The source was posted, and it's really very simple.
It's compatible with 4BSD's "ar" as well.)  The original par did not have
proper support of directories.

For private archives, use ARC, PKPAK, ZOO whatever you like.  For archives
to give to people, let's be simple, non-compressed and already supported.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473