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From: plouff@levers.enet.dec.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Archiving programs
Message-ID: <5442@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Date: 16 Oct 89 03:41:13 GMT
Sender: newsdaemon@shlump.nac.dec.com
Distribution: na
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 37

In article <23071@cup.portal.com>, whirt@cup.portal.com (William Bill Hirt) writes...
> 
>ZOO appears to pack about as efficiently as ARC. I've unpacked ZOO files
>and then re-packed them using LHarc and reduced the size of 140K Zoo
>archive to about 100K LHarc archive. When I paying to download from a
>commercial service or I have a long distance user calling the BBS to
>download a file, it is appreciated to have the file packed as small as
>possible. Many sysops are now asking their users to upload their files
>only in LHarc format. LHarc for the Amiga can handle long filenames just
>like Amiga ZOO.

and...
>ZIP has taken the IBM world by storm and once it comes to the Amiga, I
>expect to do the same across all the BBS's. When it comes down to saving
>disk space and paying telecommunications costs out of one's pocket, the
>most efficient archiver will come out on top.

Well, if I understand the situation, ZIP had its origins in the fallout 
from the legal dispute between PKware and SEA, where the former's 
ARCclone lost to the latter's original.  So at least some of ZIP's 
appeal is reaction to SEA's heavy-handedness.  But other postings in 
this thread have said that ZIP's packing efficiency is only modestly 
better than ZOO's.

On a different note, why not adapt LHARC's hybrid Huffman/Lempel-Ziv 
packing algorithm to ZOO?  A one-file-at-a-time equivalent to LHARC was 
published with source this spring in comp.binaries.ibm.pc.  Perhaps the 
moderator, Rahul Dhesi, could encourage the author of ZOO, Rahul Dhesi, 
to do so.  :-)

Wes Plouff
-- 
Wes Plouff, Digital Equipment Corp, Littleton, Mass.
plouff%levers.enet.dec@decwrl.dec.com

Networking bibliography:  _Islands in the Net_, by Bruce Sterling
			  _The Matrix_, Digital Press, forthcoming