Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: SIMTEL20 to ban ARC files Keywords: lzw, atob/btoa, 7 bit pure Message-ID: <2054@looking.UUCP> Date: 20 Sep 88 17:33:41 GMT References: <6630@ihlpl.ATT.COM> <2736@uoregon.uoregon.edu> <8475@smoke.ARPA> <2594@csccat.UUCP> <424@pigs.UUCP> Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 25 The fact is that for the net compression is not desirable. It clouds the issue, sometimes *increases* transmission time, and just makes postings harder to deal with. I would suggest we use an existing format like "cpio" to do archiving. Writing a decode only cpio program should be fairly trivial. Cpio supports all sorts of file info, directories and links. It is well known, already comes standard with many Unix machines, and is part of Posix, as I understand it. There are also quality non-pd CPIO programs out there, for those that want them. I would support TAR if it didn't put all files on block boundaries, which can be wasteful. Or even a slightly modified "par." (par is a PD archiver that was posted to the net a while ago. The source was posted, and it's really very simple. It's compatible with 4BSD's "ar" as well.) The original par did not have proper support of directories. For private archives, use ARC, PKPAK, ZOO whatever you like. For archives to give to people, let's be simple, non-compressed and already supported. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473