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From: umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: StuffIt Deluxe (Compactor)
Keywords: StuffIt, Compactor
Message-ID: <1990Aug29.162542.9766@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Date: 29 Aug 90 16:25:42 GMT
References: <1990Aug29.093732.7927@cs.UAlberta.CA>
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Lines: 42

In article <1990Aug29.093732.7927@cs.UAlberta.CA> userapv@mts.ucs.ualberta.ca (Antoine Verheijen) writes:
>In article <1990Aug29.052224.24927@ccu.umanitoba.ca> umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) writes:
>>
>> 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.
> 

Ok, I didn't know Compactor will not run on 512KE machines.   
But why is that?   Because of the ROMS, memory, or the need of system 6?
From what I've converted from StuffIt>Compactor, there has been a 33% savings
in disk space!  That's quite alot when you are talking all the megabytes
at these archive sites.  I don't wish to cut the necks of people with the
older machines, but all that disk space shouldn't be wasted so the few
that still have un upgraded 512KEs can still run the software.  Alot of 
the software seems to be getting big enough so it won't run on 512KE machines
anyways.

>   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.

I just read that StuffIt Deluxe has a proprietary format as well, that they
have vowed not to release.  I think eventually there would be a better chance
of getting the necessary info from a Shareware author than a commvercial one.

>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.

I wish PKZIP would make a version for the Mac as well, and make the file
structures compatable with the PC so both machines can decompress other's
files.