Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!alberta!antoine
From: antoine@cs.UAlberta.CA (Antoine Verheijen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: StuffIt Deluxe (Compactor)
Keywords: StuffIt, Compactor
Message-ID: <1990Aug29.093732.7927@cs.UAlberta.CA>
Date: 29 Aug 90 09:37:32 GMT
Reply-To: userapv@mts.ucs.ualberta.ca (Antoine Verheijen)
Organization: U. of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Lines: 31

In article <1990Aug29.052224.24927@ccu.umanitoba.ca> umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) writes:
>
>Why should we all have to switch to a commercial program everytime we want
>to archive something just because everyone has the unstuffer for it?  
 
I think the suggestion is for everyone to start using UnStuffIt Deluxe for
un-archiving since it is publically available (where?) to everyone. This way,
it doesn't matter if StuffIt 1.5.1 or StuffIt Deluxe was used to archive.
 
> We now have Compactor to replace StuffIt, which is shareware, and is
>much faster and compresses tighter than StuffIt 1.5.1 so why not
>switch to that instead?  Compactor also has an Uncompactor that others
>can use without having to pay a fee for.

I can think of a couple of reasons not to:
 
   1) (Un)Compactor will not run on a 512KE Mac (or smaller). There are still
      a fair number of them around.
 
   2) Compactor uses unknown/undocumented data structures and compression
      methods. This eliminates the possibility of developing tools on 
      other systems for processing compactor files (as is possible with
      StuffIt files) and makes it virtually impossible to try to recover
      partial contents in the case of a corrupted archive.

Personally, I wish the PKZIP guys would produce a version of their product
for the Mac. They know how to produce fast programs that provide very good
compression results and (like Raymond Lau) they're not quite so quiet about
what they're doing.

Antoine Verheijen	userapv@mts.ucs.ualberta.ca