Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.dal.ca!silvert
From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ZOO and comp.binaries.atari.st
Message-ID: <1989Jul1.134205.14628@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 1 Jul 89 13:42:05 GMT
References: <619@chyde.uwasa.fi>
Sender: silvert@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (Bill Silvert)
Reply-To: bill@biomel.UUCP
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 32

In article <619@chyde.uwasa.fi> hv@chyde.uwasa.fi (Harri Valkama LAKE) writes:
>I don't know how widely ZOO is used in Atari ST world but I
>think that we should consider to change our "manners" in such
>a way that comp.binaries.atari.st could use ONLY ZOO as the
>one and only archiving pgm instead of ARC.

I would approach this with caution.  Archivers have to work on many
different machines, and extractors have to be widely available.

First we have to ensure that all submitters have zoo and all
potential users have either zoo or booz.  I haven't yet seen
self-extracting archives for the ST such as those for PC zoo archives,
but these could be dangerous (Trojans could be included).

We also have to be sure that the archives can be read on other
machines, since sysops may need to examine ST archives on BBS's
run on other machines.  For example, I run a BBS on a Unix system, and
I had major problems compiling ZOO.

Also, I have had trouble transferring ZOO archives, and I suspect the
problem is that some protocols don't recognize ZOO magic.  Using ZMDM
I was unable to download some ZOO archives with Ymodem, although the
same programs transferred it OK with Zmodem.

Until these problems are cleared up, I see no need to discard the old
reliable ARC.

-- 
Bill Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division.
Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Dartmouth, NS, Canada B2Y 4A2
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