Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!ucsd!nprdc!malloy From: malloy@nprdc.arpa (Sean Malloy) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Don't change formats before the archive sites (Was Re: Zoo yes) Message-ID: <1529@skinner.nprdc.arpa> Date: 25 Feb 89 18:38:59 GMT References: <11771@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <2917@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> Reply-To: malloy@nprdc.arpa (Sean Malloy) Distribution: comp Organization: Navy Personnel R&D Center, San Diego Lines: 50 In article <2917@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> brunke@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Jim Brunke) writes: >In article <11771@watdragon.waterloo.edu> hpchang@tiger.waterloo.edu (I'm a Wild One) writes: >>In article lfk@mbio.med.upenn.edu (Lee Kolakowski) writes: >>>Since no one seems to prefer compress and tar for archive >>>transmission to/from PC's, Here is another vote for zoo. >>>Arc/PK{ARC?ZIP} is brain dead, incompatible with Unix/Vms ... etc. Brain dead? No. Remember that the version released is 0.90 -- it's a _beta_ test release. If you've ever done serious software development, think about the last product you worked on, and then imagine the kind of comments you'd have gotten if you released it four months earlier and the 'brain-dead' users thought that they were getting the final version. As for its being incompatible with Unix/VMS, again, it hasn't been out long enough for any non-MSDOS versions to appear. You can get the file formats trivially, so you can write them yourself if you want them that bad. >>As a fellow U of W student - I can say that we ARE using ARC on unix systems and >>I haven't had a problem yet with any of the arc files I received from the net ... >>including moria - just recently posted. > >I will have to agree, I have never gotten a garbeled binary here, and I am >running the Unix version of ARC (that is compatible w/ PK) As a commentary on this, in comp.graphics, a zoo'd archive of a ray tracing program was posted recently. Using the ZOO source from SIMTEL20, _none_ of the files in the zoo archive were extractable, all failing CRC check. All of the .ARC files I've gotten off the net have extracted correctly; the one .ZOO file I try to get dies horribly. This is probably an exception to zoo's normal performance, but it sure doesn't look good to _me_. ARC is widespread; ZOO is much less so. ZIP is just now appearing. As little as I like keeping the products of 'Sue Everyone Anyway' alive, there are enough archives of MSDOS software on BBSs and sites like SIMTEL20 using it that it would be massively inconvenient to require converting the .zoo file to a .arc file to add it to the archives. Not everybody interested in binaries off the net grabs everything as they're posted -- the postings of people asking about package _X_ posted some months ago proves that. Let's leave the postings in the format that the archive sites use -- the expense of maintaining the archives is not inconsequential; let's not add to the inconvenience as well. Sean Malloy Navy Personnel Research & Development Center San Diego, CA 92152-6800 malloy@nprdc.navy.mil