Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pacbell!hoptoad!xanth!kent
From: kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Kent Paul Dolan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Sources in text mode please
Summary: please no
Message-ID: <5257@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 15 May 88 14:14:57 GMT
References: <8805110255.AA21249@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <52841@sun.uucp> <9037@oberon.USC.EDU>
Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 27


I want to petition for zoo's for everything.  Having the file names
and the directory structure be maintained is just too valuable a
feature to give up for the pitifully small chance that I can make a
repair that even I trust to a source file that lost a couple of
characters along the way.  I download with kermit, which does a CRC
check on each packet, and if the file got to my host OK, it gets to me
OK.  If it didn't, the host folks reacquire it and I wait a few days.
It took 15 hours over 2 days to rebuild the ARP 1.1 stuff because the
file structure and name space are destroyed as it was released, and I
rebuilt it on a Unix system, where there was lots of space, rather
than my 512K two floppy home Amiga system.  When I got it all right, I
dwnloaded it (perfectly, of course, despite some of the noisiest phone
lines imaginable - good old kermit!) and built it onto another disk
with a single command (and twenty minutes of grinding noise
competitions between the drives ;-).

If the files had all been distributed as a big zoo, I could have
skipped the intermediate step.

Marco, who can't get hold of zoo, arc, compress, sq and all the other
stuff I use every day?  They are freely distributed around the world
for Amigas, and we have all but sq on the VAX here as well.  I build
zoos to send out on the vax, rather than hauling stuff home, zooing it
here, and uploading it again.  Easy as pie.

Kent, the man from xanth.