zip

[Doc Shipley]

John Foust wrote:

> At 09:58 AM 5/20/2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
> 
>>ZIP is 100% completely wide open.  I remember Phil Katz himself donated donating the specs to the BBS community.  There was never any question as to whether or not the format was meant to be documented.
> 
> 
> Phil's pickled and molding in the grave and the world turns.  There's old 
> 'pkzip', there's WinZip (commercial software with undocumented but perhaps 
> rarely used extensions), there's 'infozip' open source'd, there's Zip 
> extraction in Windows XP...  there's plenty of standards to choose from.  :-)

   Are these all different standards, or simply implementations of the 
ZIP standard?

   Just to throw a small wrench into the ZIP vs tar monkey-works, ZIP 
*is* more reliable in MacOSX than tar.  The tar that ships from Apple 
doesn't archive the resource fork of a file, breaking functionality of a 
lot of native Mac files.

   In the current context, this isn't directly a big deal, but it's 
something to consider as an illustration.  There will always be certain 
limitations, on certain systems, to any archival tool.  Any archiving 
project that gets bogged down in finding The Perfect Universal Format is 
doomed.


	Doc