Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Let's have ONE standard lharc!
Message-ID: <17532023@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Date: 20 Jan 91 04:48:41 GMT
References: <767@grapevine.EBay.Sun.COM> <20609@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <10765@hydra.Helsinki.FI>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Lines: 35

In article <10765@hydra.Helsinki.FI> wirzeniu@cs.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
>In article <20609@yunexus.YorkU.CA> oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>>I thought that the prevailing standard (at least on non-un*x systems)
>>was zip.
>
>Why not use zoo as a standard, it is already quite portable, though it's
>compression isn't all that wonderful. Work on this is supposed to be on
>the way, however.

Zoo is indeed the best binary archive standard!  It produces excellent
results on all supported platforms.  Unfortunately Rahul Dhesi's solid,
reliable pro bono work has difficulty competing with the assiduous
flackery of Phil Katz's little PC empire.

What started as a quest for a good way to bundle files together with
integrity checking and some compression has now become an all-out souped
up drag race for crunch percentages and self-extract doodads, with such
wimpy issues as cross-platform portability and standardization left
behind in the dust.  As a result we have PC formats you can't build on
UNIX; bogus popup-windowing freak show front ends that won't take a
simple file-list on stdin; and weird Bolivian squeeze algorithms blowing
in from the hinterlands.

Zoo hasn't been updated in a while -- hasn't HAD to, because the damn
thing WORKS.  Quaint concept, I know.

Mind you, source groups deserve source text, not binaries.  But if you
have to pump binaries somewhere else, do it in a Zoo.

-- 
You are sunlight and I, moon     |
Joined by the gods of fortune    |
Midnight and high noon           |
Sharing the sky                  |  Tom Neff
We have been blessed, you and I  |  tneff@bfmny0.bfm.com