Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:12824 comp.sources.wanted:3519
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!ptsfa!pacbell!att-ih!occrsh!uokmax!rmtodd
From: rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: pkxarc wanted
Message-ID: <1084@uokmax.UUCP>
Date: 4 Mar 88 22:14:27 GMT
References: <162@focsys.UUCP> <1053@ur-tut.UUCP> <695@hqda-ai.UUCP>
Reply-To: rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP ()
Organization: University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
Lines: 43
Keywords: no ftp available please post pkxarc

In article <695@hqda-ai.UUCP> merlin@hqda-ai.UUCP (David S. Hayes) writes:
>     You should not post the binaries again.  The binary (for IBM
>PC) of PKARC is already well-distributed.  This is fine, but what
>is really needed is the C code, so we can try to run this on our
>Unix machines.  As it stands now, you must have both a PC and a
>Unix system.  Further, after the files are received on the Unix
>machine via Usenet, they must be transferred to the PC for
>de-ARCing.
Well, as other people have mentioned, source code for an alleged PKXARC-
compatible archive program for UNIX has appeared on Usenet before.  As
I recall, the source code contained comments saying the poster had gotten
it to work on his VAX.  Said program refused to do *anything* but drop core
on this here Encore Multimax.  (There's a lot of stuff Vaxen will let sloppy
coders get away with that other machines won't...).  I would have messed with
it to see why it didn't work, but the ZOO source came out the next week,
so I pitched my copy of the Unix PKARC into the bit bucket.
  BTW, I agree with you about posting the PKARC PC binaries.  They're
available from practically every PC-based BBS in the known cosmos.  People,
go look at your local BBS before you ask that this junk be shipped around
the country at the expense of lots of large companies.  I recall hearing
that hoptoad has already dropped the binary groups due to excessive
volume; do you really want to encourage the backbone sites to follow
suit?
>     It would be better if we could unpack the archives directly
>on the Unix machines, so we can look at the documentation and such
>before investing effort in moving all the code to some other
>machine.
 Agreed.  But I'm not sure PKARC is the solution.  Zoo is a PD program,
with C source available, that does much the same thing as PKARC, with
about the same compression ratio (not surprising, they both use 13-bit
LZW compression), and it's available for PCs and Unix machines (and Amigas
and VMS too, I believe).  The Unix version compiled and ran here after
a 1-line change to makefile.  (When was the last time you could say
that about a program from the net?).  This program seems to have
been written with an eye to portability. 
  As another alternative, there's the tar&compress combination.  It's
got a long history of use on Unix systems, both tar and compress have
PD versions available, and both have versions for MSDOS.  The only problem
is getting people to use one of these two formats instead of the PKARC format
which is currently limited to PCs and *some* Unix machines.
___________________________________________________________________________
Richard Todd		Dubious Domain: rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu
USSnail:820 Annie Court,Norman OK 73069 	Fido:1:147/1
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