Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!texbell!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Archiving programs
Message-ID: <4353@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 14 Oct 89 20:25:44 GMT
References: <23071@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Distribution: na
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 34

In message <12417@polya.Stanford.EDU> Tomas G. Rokicki

>	... Zoo ...

In article <23071@cup.portal.com> whirt@cup.portal.com (William Bill Hirt) writes:
>As a BBS sysop for the past year and a half, I certainly disagree with
>the above conclusion. This maybe true in the Usenet community, but in the
>BBS world, ARC is certainly the more common of the archivers used. I have
>over 1700 files on my board, and I'm sure the number of ARC files outnumber
>the ZOO's by at least 3 to 1. I would say most non_Usenet Amiga users
>know better how to use ARC than ZOO.

Yes, but most of those files are for the PC, aren't they?  The fact is that
ARC is pretty brain-damaged on the Amiga, like filenames are restricted to
DOS-style, whatever that is, like eight characters plus an extension.
I have seen Amiga distributions with icky command files ARCed along with 
the program's files to rename stuff back to the friendlier, longer, 
Amiga-style names.  (Sure, you could restrict filenames to match, but
those restriction suck, plus it only applies for the people who you can
convince to do that.)

We are zooing all the Amiga stuff on our BBS.  We like that because we can
unshar, uudecode, etc, on Unix, the zoo the stuff up on Unix, then Amiga
guys (for example) can download and unzoo.  Although this could
all be done with ARC as there is a Unix version of ARC, the previously
mentioned naming restrictions ARC imposes changes the sysop's archive
creation process from a nearly totally automatic 
"zoo -update /usr/bbs/files/amiga/package *" into a manual process of
consing up scripts to change the names around.

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