Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!ucsd!usc!apple!olivea!orc!bu.edu!dartvax!news From: Jim.Matthews@dartmouth.edu (Jim Matthews) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Stuffit Deluxe Message-ID: <24016@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> Date: 31 Aug 90 14:02:10 GMT References: <1990Aug20.075638.3276@rbdc> <6257@emory.mathcs.emory.edu> <2146@ux.acs.umn.edu> <1990Aug29.204448.23954@svc.portal.com> <5186@spt.entity.com> <44411@apple.Apple.COM> <5189@spt.entity.com> <25@genco.uucp> Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU Reply-To: Jim.Matthews@dartmouth.edu (Jim Matthews) Organization: Dartmouth Software Development Lines: 49 In article <25@genco.uucp>, rad@genco.uucp (Bob Daniel) writes: > What's the big deal!! Unstuffit and Stuffit Classic 1.6 can unstuff deluxe > archives. The end result is that you CAN unsit deluxe files without having > to pay Aladdin a dime. Seems like this is starting to turn into an > unnecessary flame. Not publishing the StuffIt! Deluxe format *is* a big deal, because it makes users of the format dependent on Alladin for tools. I don't think that Alladin is out to get the Mac community, in fact I think the decision to keep the format secret makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint. But the community that has been using StuffIt! to archive freely distributed software would lose a lot of flexibility if it moved to a secret format. A couple of examples from personal experience: I have written a Mac FTP program that automatically de-binhexes and unstuffs files. This feature saves me and my users a lot of time (since unstuffing generally happens while the Mac is waiting for data) and hassle (since they only have to run one program). I couldn't have implemented this feature if the StuffIt! format wasn't public. I have also written a simple unstuffing application, and lo and behold it's four times faster than StuffIt! 1.5.1 (about the same speed as DDExpand). No one (besides Alladin) will ever write a faster Unstuffit Deluxe, because no one besides Alladin will have the information necessary to do so. I have spoken to folks from Alladin via e-mail and at MacWorld, and they have a few answers for these concerns. They seem willing to license the format to people who will implement unstuffing for other platforms (although I doubt they'll let the resulting code be freely distributed, as unsit is now). They're providing an interface to the StuffIt! Deluxe Engine for people like telecommunications vendors, but the calling interface is inappropriate for many applications (you tell it where the file is and it unstuffs it -- you can't feed it bits of the file at a time in order to interleave de-compression with file transfer). And the Engine can not be freely distributed. So while the people at Alladin are trying to be helpful, I think their commercial ambitions have made StuffIt! Deluxe inappropriate for use on the net. I think that what is needed is a high-performance alternative to StuffIt! 1.5.1 that uses the classic format and provides some of the interface goodies of StuffIt! Deluxe (like folder navigation). StuffIt! Classic 1.6 doesn't fit the bill, since it defaults to the deluxe format. Alternatively, if a Mac version of PKZip or some other high-quality, open- format archiver appeared it might make sense to switch to that. Jim Matthews Dartmouth Software Development --