daanjj@neabbs.UUCP (DAAN JITTA) (04/03/89)
Big time shortage delayed the whole project, but finally it's ready: today (April 3 1989) the binaries of Zoo and Fiz (and some docs) will be posted to the moderator of comp.binaries.atari.st. Sources (probably diffs only, as the source is BIG) will follow in a few weeks time. Especially for those of you who don't know what Zoo's possibilities are, I hereby include the file ARCVSZOO.TXT (this file will also be present in the Zoo posting). Decide yourself which one is better, ARC or Zoo- I already made my choice! A graphical shell, written by Ernst Blok, is now in full beta-test; it will be the same to Zoo as ARCSH is to ARC. Expect it to be posted to comp.binaries.atari.st in a couple of weeks time. <*-*-*-* begin of file ARCVSZOO.TXT *-*-*-*> ARC versus Zoo ============== Lots of you out there will wonder what the difference is between ARC and Zoo, and why they need to consider changing in the first place. Well, both ARC and Zoo are archivers: you feed them a list of files, which they will compress (unless you forbid them to do that explicitly) and put in one big file, the archive. Another common point is that both ARC and Zoo sources are freely available (ARC is shareware, Zoo is Public Domain) and that versions of Zoo and ARC are available for a lot of different computers: UNIX boxes, PC's, Amiga's and now ST's. Let's discuss the most striking differences in some detail: DIRECTORY SUPPORT The numbero uno difference: ARC does not support directories, only plain files. Zoo DOES support directories: when adding files, Zoo usually also stores the paths as specified in the list of files to be added. At extraction time, Zoo can be instructed to place the members of an archive in the directories they were coming from- a big plus. It's even possible to let Zoo create all directories needed. RECOVERING DATA FROM CORRUPTED ARCHIVES If you have experience with corrupted ARC archives, you will like this Zoo feature very much! Zoo marks both the beginning of (file) headers and the beginning of file data with special tokens, allowing extraction of all (except the corrupted one) files from the archive. Zoo even has a special utility to aid the recover operation: a program called "Fiz". Offcourse there is also a ST version of Fiz. SPEED Zoo/ST 2.01 (compiled with Turbo C for the ST v1.0) is on average +- 40% faster than ARC 5.21 (compiled with Mark Williams C 3.0.6); some operations are even twice as fast with Zoo (eg adding new files to an existing archive). Difference of compilers explaines part of the difference, entirely different archive organisation explains the rest. See the source for more info. COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES ARC has several compression methods and, after analyzing which compressing technique will yield the smallest result, usually decides to "crunch" the file using a so-called Lempel-Ziv compression scheme. Zoo only has one compression technique (the same Lempel-Ziv algorithm, seems slightly better implemented). Zoo doesn't have to analyze (saves time); ARC always uses the most optimal technique (saves space). SLICK POSSIBILITIES Let's name some of them: - listing the contents of several archives with one command; - ability to add ASCII comments to every member of an archive and to the archive as a whole; - keep multiple generations of your source files in one Zoo archive; - Zoo usually refuses to extract a file when the file which will be overwritten is newer than the file in the archive. You have to force Zoo to extract the file using a special comand-line option. Safe! Many thanks to Rahul Dhesi for writing this excellent program! Enjoy! <*-*-*-* end of file ARCVSZOO.TXT *-*-*-*> Finally, I would like to make my apologies to the following people, who send me mail- but I never answered 'cause I have to pay quite some money for sending Usenet stuff: Rainer Klute, L. J. Dickey, Klamer Schutte, Richard E. Covert (still want the floppy??), Don Petcher, Hans-Ch.Eckert, Bernd Kursawe Sorry guys! Daan* / . . __ / ( / / / (__/ / / (Daan Josephus Jitta) / / __/ __/ old-fashioned: modern: -------------- ------- Bos en Lommerweg 10 ii UUCP: ...!mcvax!neabbs!daanjj OR daanjj@neabbs NL-1055 EB Amsterdam Fido: 2:280/1 -- daan jitta Holland Fax: (+31) 020-763706 -- daan jitta Tel. (+31) 020-820521 Telex: 12969, NEABS NL, attn: daan jitta