zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Jim Leonard]

On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 07:34:24AM -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> 
> > You can not plan on what is the next best archival tool and you can't
> > please everyone. Use what you have and try to make it so most people can
> > handle it one way or another.
> 
> My suggestion is to stay away from proprietary compressed binary formats.

*Everything* is a proprietary binary format, and in the grand scheme
of things, compression is simply a binary encoding.  That's why I
think damning a certain archiving program/format just because of the
platform it runs onis silly.

I see people on the thread complaining about having to bundle a
windows emulator with each archive.  Excuse me?  Let's look at some
popular formats:  TAR, ZIP, RAR all have source-code unarchivers.
Which means they can run on any machine with a C compiler.  So
what's with all the paranoia?  Just use whatever works as long as
more than one major platform can extract it.

(Not directed at Sellam, just commenting on all thread participants.)
-- 
Jim Leonard         http://www.oldskool.org/        Email: trixter at oldskool.org
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