zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:

> 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.

This misses the point entirely.  With a ZIP archive you are munging the
raw data into something it is not.  I guess if you wanted to be psycho you
could also consider ASCII to be a "proprietary binary format", but 40
years of history and standardization would disagree with you.

See Dwight's last reply re: archivist standards.  Putting stuff in a ZIP
file is NOT archiving.

> 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.

For now.  What about 1 year from now?  5 years?  10 years?  50 years?  100
years?  500 years?

Think LONGTERM.

> (Not directed at Sellam, just commenting on all thread participants.)

Ain't no thang ;)

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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