Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!crdgw1!rdsunx!davidsen
From: davidsen@rdsunx.crd.GE.COM (William E Davidsen)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: Why use zoo?
Message-ID: <19654@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 17 May 91 15:05:30 GMT
References: <14059121:55:36HL00@lehigh.bitnet> <8927@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corporate R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 41


In article <8927@pbhyf.PacBell.COM> you write:

|> Perhaps its because zoo is very portable to other operating systems.  I use
|> zoo because it allows me to transfer between any Unix system to any DOS
|> system.  It works very well.

  I have been given some tentative deadlines by Rahul Dhesi for "new
zoo." The Beta version should be in my hands by the end of this month,
with some very serious speed problems but full compression. I will be
doing both sanity checking and sharing thoughts on speedups, with a
target date of July 4th for a production version. Obviously I will
update the User Guide, and possibly the man page if asked to do so.

  Any archiver used in this group must have the following attributes:
  a) free
  b) ported to popular UNIX variants at a minimum, VMS, Amiga, etc
     desirable.
  c) usefully fast (I don't have 2-3 hours of CPU per megabyte)

  I have tried long and hard to convince the author of ARJ that a useful
UNIX version would help rather than hinder his MS-DOS registrations, but
he is unconvinced. A UNIX version, if ever released, will be seriously
crippled.

  I have been in touch with the author of LHA (aka lharc) about a UNIX
port, but the last released source I have has major portions in hand
optimized assembler as output from some C compiler. LHA also lack
comments, which is desirable if not absolutely required.

  I have been participating in info-zip to work toward a ZIP
implementation. There is a good unzip package, but until recently the
zip failed the speed test and even now is painfully slow. It is still
pretty slow. And with PKZIP v2.0 coming out, it may produce obsolete
versions as well.

  When the production free ZIP is out, and the production new ZOO, I
will report results and consider a change. Since a change of archiver
would require a lot of modification of the scripts which produce the
postings, if the size of the archives is similar, or if zoo continues to
be 3x faster than zip, I will be unwilling to change.