Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!kunivv1!janhen
From: janhen@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl (Jan Hendrikx)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ZOO and comp.binaries.atari.st
Message-ID: <367@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl>
Date: 6 Jul 89 13:18:02 GMT
References: <619@chyde.uwasa.fi> <2492@water.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: janhen@wn2.UUCP (Jan Hendrikx)
Organization: University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Lines: 83

In article <2492@water.waterloo.edu> ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (Lee Dickey) writes:
>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.
>
>ZOO is not widely used (yet).  It is new, and has been distributed.
>Have you tested or used it extensively on the ST?   Are the sources
>freely available?

Zoo *IS* widely used in the Amiga community. It is very reliable.
And the sources are freely available.

In fact, on the Amiga sources/binaries groups, Zoo has been already *the*
archiver of choice for ages.

>I looked at the documenatation that is in our manual on the UNIX
>system here, and the explanations look HORRENDOUS!  Two levels of
>commands do not help, awkward syntax for simple semantic do not help,
>and I saw a plea for help from someone who had simply misplaced
>a punctuation mark.  That says to me not carefull planning.

You mean you don't like the built-in help? And you think Arc is
more intuitive to use (if you want the same thing)?

And if you really find the 'expert' commands too complicated, you
can use the 'novice' commands instead, which are sufficient most
of the time.

This is the built-in help:

Zoo archiver, Version 2.01 (1988/08/25 12:43:57)
(C) Copyright 1988 Rahul Dhesi -- Noncommercial use permitted
Usage: zoo {acDeglLPTuUvx}[aAcCdEfInmMNoOpPqu1:/.@n] archive file
("zoo h" for help)

Choose a command from within {} and zero or more modifiers from within [].
E.g.:  `zoo a save /bin/*' will archive all files in /bin into save.zoo.
(Please see the user manual for a complete description of commands.)

 Commands in {} mean:         |Modifiers in [] mean:
  a     add files             | a     show archive name(s) in listing
  c     update comments       | A     apply g or c to archive
  D     delete stored files   | c     add/list comments
  e,x   extract files         | d     extract/list deleted files too
  g     adj. gen. limit/count | dd    extract/list only deleted files
  l,L,v,V list filenames      | E     erase backup after packing
  P     pack archive          | f     fast add (no compression) or list
  T     fix archive datestamp | M     move when adding (erase original)
  u     add only newer files  | n     add only files not already in archive
  U     undelete stored files | N     send extracted data to Neverland
  f     act as filter         | c/u   compress/uncompress as filter
 -----------------------------  O     don't ask "Overwrite?"
  q     be quiet                p     pipe extracted data to standard output
  :     don't store dir names   /,//  extract full pathnames
  .     pack to current dir     I     add filenames read from stdin
  C     show file CRC value     +/-   enable/disable generations
  S     overwrite newer files   g     list generation limits
  P     pack after adding       @n    start extract/list at position n
  m     list file modes         OO    overwrite read-only files

Novice usage:  zoo -cmd archive[.zoo] file...  where -cmd is one of these:
-add -extract -move -test -print -delete -list -update -freshen -comment

>On the plus side, I think that the big advantage of ZOO is that
>one can store directory path information along with the file.
>
>Convince me please!  What other feature do you find that is compelling
>enough to convince the world to give up a reliable piece of software
>in favour of a new one that probably still has bugs in it.

Like I said, there are no fatal bugs in Zoo that I ever knew of.
But you wanted features? Well, you might like the ability to have
several versions of the same file in the archive (generations). And
the directory structure is something you don't want to miss once
you used it. And you can have file names longer than 8+3, though that
is admittedly of more use on Amiga's, Unix and other systems that
normally allow such filenames. (But it shows that Arc is needlessly
restricted in this area). And you can attach comments to each file
separately and to the archive as a whole.

>    L. J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.