ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) (02/14/90)
In article <1513@krafla.rhi.hi.is> frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) writes: > >One a side note - when c.b.i.p starts running again, which of the available >file-compression utilities do the readers of the group want to be used ? >ZOO and ZIP are obvious candidates, but there may be other possibilities. >Any suggestions ? >Or maybe we should just leave the decision to the new moderator. Here we go again. I agree that the new moderator is the person to make the decision. But if the packing method comes under discussion again, the situation is different from the time when .zoo was chosen: 1) .zoo was Rahul's own method, which meant that the moderator was throuh and though familiar with the method and the possible problems and remedies. 2) We now have unzip available for unix, which means that file integrity can be tested without first having to transfer to PC the way it used to be. Also .zip files can now be unpacked under unix. 3) We still do not have unix zip, that is packing under unix (or if we do, it has not yet been generally circulated). 4) Compared to .arc .zip and .lzh (all now more or less available for unix), .zoo was (and is) quite cumbersome to use, especially in packing. 5) Should the new moderator decide to invite a discussion, we are in for much traffic (but what the heck, what's news without any traffic, anyway). ................................................................... Prof. Timo Salmi (Moderating at anon. ftp site 128.214.12.3) School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: gado::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun
cur022@zodiac.ukc.ac.uk (Bob Eager) (02/15/90)
In article <1990Feb14.134810.8305@uwasa.fi>, ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) writes: > 2) We now have unzip available for unix, which means that file > integrity can be tested without first having to transfer to PC the > way it used to be. Also .zip files can now be unpacked under unix. Remember there are other systems apart from MS-DOS and UNIX; how about the VMS and IBM communities? Perhaps the programs could be ported, but they need to be available, working, on those systems before day 1. ZOO already works on VMS, MS-DOS and UNIX at least. It may not be the most fantastically efficient, but notice (for example) that there are already .ZIP archives around that need the *latest* PKUNZIP. At least all ZOO archives are the same... ---------------------+----------------------------------------------------- Bob Eager | University of Kent at Canterbury rde@ukc.ac.uk | +44 227 764000 ext 7589 ---------------------+----------------------------------------------------- *** NB *** Do NOT use the return path in the article header *************** ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
feg@clyde.ATT.COM (Forrest Gehrke,2C-119,7239,ATTBL) (02/15/90)
In article <1990Feb14.134810.8305@uwasa.fi>, ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) writes: > Here we go again. I agree that the new moderator is the person to > make the decision. But if the packing method comes under discussion > again, the situation is different from the time when .zoo was > chosen: > > 1) .zoo was Rahul's own method, which meant that the moderator was > through and through familiar with the method and the possible problems > and remedies. > Nor has ZOO seen wide acceptance in the PC world anywhere but here. > 2) We now have unzip available for unix, which means that file > integrity can be tested without first having to transfer to PC the > way it used to be. Also .zip files can now be unpacked under unix. I have managed to compile two UNZIP versions for BSD Unix on SysV rel3 Unix but the resulting programs have not worked reliably. This may have been due to the changes I had to make, but I have not heard of any other SysV version. > > 3) We still do not have unix zip, that is packing under unix (or if > we do, it has not yet been generally circulated). > > 4) Compared to .arc .zip and .lzh (all now more or less available > for unix), .zoo was (and is) quite cumbersome to use, especially in > packing. > I certainly agree with Timo on this point. Since there are good working versions of ARC on the two main versions of Unix and there is no question of its availability on the PC's ARC seems the best choice. Forrest Gehrke feg@clyde.ATT.COM
perand@nada.kth.se (Per Andersson) (02/16/90)
In article <1990Feb14.134810.8305@uwasa.fi> ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) writes: > >2) We now have unzip available for unix, which means that file >integrity can be tested without first having to transfer to PC the >way it used to be. Also .zip files can now be unpacked under unix. Sorry, this is 'can be unpacked under BSD Unix'. In case somebody has a unzip program that works under sys V rel<3 please speak up. The advantage ARC once had, and Zoo has is that it runs on many different platforms. BSD unix and mess-dos may be dominant in some places, but for home Unix machines system V is the OS. Please consider this, whoever you are who will have to deal with this problem. Per -- --- Per Andersson Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden perand@admin.kth.se, @nada.kth.se
bob@omni.com (Bob Weissman) (02/16/90)
In article <1990Feb14.134810.8305@uwasa.fi>, ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) writes: > 2) We now have unzip available for unix, which means that file > integrity can be tested without first having to transfer to PC the > way it used to be. Also .zip files can now be unpacked under unix. Zoo is also available for Unix. I use it frequently. It therefore has the two advantages noted above for zip. > 3) We still do not have unix zip, that is packing under unix (or if > we do, it has not yet been generally circulated). Right. But we do have unix zoo. Another advantage of zoo is that you don't need two different programs to pack and unpack. > 4) Compared to .arc .zip and .lzh (all now more or less available > for unix), .zoo was (and is) quite cumbersome to use, especially in > packing. I beg to differ. I don't have extensive experience with zip, and none with lzh, but zoo is the first archiver I've seen which lets you pack an entire directory hierarchy with one command, and unpack it into the same hierarchy with one command. This is real useful. You just have to forget the "novice" commands and learn the "expert" commands. Rahul's extensive Unix-style manual page makes this easy. -- Bob Weissman Internet: bob@omni.com UUCP: ...!{apple,pyramid,sgi,tekbspa,uunet}!koosh!bob
LC.YRS@forsythe.stanford.edu (Richard Stanton) (02/16/90)
In article <14727@zodiac.ukc.ac.uk>, cur022@zodiac.ukc.ac.uk (Bob Eager) writes: >In article <1990Feb14.134810.8305@uwasa.fi>, ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) writes: >> 2) We now have unzip available for unix, which means that file >> integrity can be tested without first having to transfer to PC the >> way it used to be. Also .zip files can now be unpacked under unix. > >Remember there are other systems apart from MS-DOS and UNIX; how about >the VMS and IBM communities? Perhaps the programs could be ported, but they >need to be available, working, on those systems before day 1. > There is a VMS version of UNZIP, available in pd3:<misc.vaxvms> on wsmr-simtel20.army.mil. It is dated 1989, and the source mentions implosion, but I haven't actually tried it on an imploded file. There are two compiled versions contained with the source, but neither worked on my machine. However, compiling the source was straightforward, and produced a working executable. Richard Stanton
robison@dfsun1.electro.swri.edu (Bob Robison) (02/16/90)
In article <1745@borabora.omni.com> bob@omni.com (Bob Weissman) writes: [... stuff deleted...] >> 4) Compared to .arc .zip and .lzh (all now more or less available >> for unix), .zoo was (and is) quite cumbersome to use, especially in >> packing. > >I beg to differ. I don't have extensive experience with zip, and none >with lzh, but zoo is the first archiver I've seen which lets you pack an >entire directory hierarchy with one command, and unpack it into the same >hierarchy with one command. This is real useful. You just have to forget >Bob Weissman I also think that this is important (maintaining directory heirarchies). That has been the biggest advantage of zoo that I have seen. I do have a couple of questions relevant to the above though: 1) Where can I get a unix version of zoo? 2) Where can I get the latest lharc for MSDOS & unix? (I got lharc10e.com off of grape, but I had an older list that showed lharc113 -- this wasn't on grape) I like ZIP, and it is much faster than the lharc I tried (1.00), but it would be nice to have a program that was truly free, and that had compress & decompress in the same program. bob -- Bob Robison - Southwest Research Institute, Electromagnetics Div. robison@dfsun1.electro.swri.edu {sun!texsun, gatech!petro, uunet!cs.utexas.edu}!swrinde!dfsun1!robison
ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) (02/16/90)
In article <14727@zodiac.ukc.ac.uk> cur022@zodiac.ukc.ac.uk (Bob Eager) writes: >In article <1990Feb14.134810.8305@uwasa.fi>, ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) writes: >> 2) We now have unzip available for unix, which means that file > >ZOO already works on VMS, MS-DOS and UNIX at least. It may not be the most >fantastically efficient, but notice (for example) that there are already >.ZIP archives around that need the *latest* PKUNZIP. At least all ZOO >archives are the same... Our new moderator has chosen to continue with zoo. This settles the whole thing in the best manner. Please note, however, that I was just pondering the different methods. (We have all of them available for the PC end of things in the pc/pd2 directory). I did not express any preferences, especially since I waited the moderator's decision, which we now have. ................................................................... Prof. Timo Salmi (Moderating at anon. ftp site 128.214.12.3) School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: gado::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun
davidsen@sixhub.UUCP (Wm E. Davidsen Jr) (02/16/90)
I guess I better say something about this before the .d group gets
more volume than the binaries. I have just spent a LOT of time moving
Rahul's "make a posting" stuff to SysV and getting it working in a way
which is reasonable for me. Don't think that you have to get your
opinion in quickly, I am *not* about to change soon.
Any change will be to an archiver which is extremely portable. I
regularly work with Xenix/286, Xenix/386, MS-DOS, VMS, SunOS, Ultrix,
V.3/386, Unicos, and whatever SysV thing runs on a Stardent. I have
friends who want it to run on SysIII (PC/ix and LSI-11), and Amiga, too.
I care a very great deal about portability, perhaps more than most of
you, who want to be sure it runs on YOUR platform. An if something runs
on TOPS-20 Keith would like it for SIMTEL20 some day. You can also bet
that it will be free.
I'm willing to listen to suggestions about decoders, but almost every
unix site has uudecode, and that's a big plus. I have to balance that
against the problems with EBCDIC.
I am saving all of the postings which have reasonable technical
points, and I'm looking at porting lharc. First it wouldn't run on a 32
bit machine, then I made the ints shorts, now it won't run on machines
with short>16 bits. Now it really does have to be examined to see where
the "silent truncation" is being done. Also, the unix versions currently
don't restore the permissions and date modified. That's important on
some systems.
I have had some private mail with Rahul over the years and he was
talking about a better zoo. Unfortunately that was before he got so
busy, so I don't know what's happening on that.
Let's keep up the technical discussion, but don't expect any changes
for awhile. The only thing I want to do for the next few months is post.
--
bill davidsen - davidsen@sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc
"Getting old is bad, but it beats the hell out of the alternative" -anonjmerrill@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Jason Merrill) (02/16/90)
In article <1489@dfsun1.electro.swri.edu> robison@dfsun1.electro.swri.edu (Bob Robison) writes: >In article <1745@borabora.omni.com> bob@omni.com (Bob Weissman) writes: >>I beg to differ. I don't have extensive experience with zip, and none >>with lzh, but zoo is the first archiver I've seen which lets you pack an >>entire directory hierarchy with one command, and unpack it into the same >>hierarchy with one command. This is real useful. You just have to forget > >I also think that this is important (maintaining directory heirarchies). >That has been the biggest advantage of zoo that I have seen. >... You can do that with PKZIP, too. The command is 'pkzip -r -p' (recurse subdirs and include paths)
btrue@emdeng.Dayton.NCR.COM (Barry.True) (02/16/90)
In article <1745@borabora.omni.com> bob@omni.com (Bob Weissman) writes: > >I beg to differ. I don't have extensive experience with zip, and none >with lzh, but zoo is the first archiver I've seen which lets you pack an >entire directory hierarchy with one command, and unpack it into the same >hierarchy with one command. This is real useful. You just have to forget >the "novice" commands and learn the "expert" commands. Rahul's extensive >Unix-style manual page makes this easy. > Version 1.01 of PKZIP/PKUNZIP also allows packing/unpacking an entire directory heirarchy. However it still does suffer from the fact that you can't zip files on UNIX, only unzip them. I thought the whole crux of the matter was not which archiving system to use but which ENCODING/DECODING system to use? On most UNIX systems that I've worked with you can't transmit binary data over regular mail lines. That is why they had to be encoded at the source end and decoded at the target end. This is the case here. Since most of the PD archiving packages are available for a small fee (i.e., < $5 from shareware/PD distributors) or free over then NET or from FTP sites, and since there are also PD utilities to convert from one archive format to another (Arcmaster comes to mind since I'm currently using it! :^>), what is the real issue? I know that many of you have said that you want to unPAK/ZIP/ZOO/WHATEVER the archives on the UNIX system before transferring them to your PC but is that an absolute requirement? Maybe I'm ignorant here and, if I am, someone please let me know. What kind of file transfer methods are being used to transfer the files from UNIX boxes to PCs out on the NET? Currently we have PCs and UNIX systems set up on a LAN and use a binary file transfer method to get and send files to an from the UNIX system we want. Since we also have remote login capability we can do all the necessary processing directly from our PCs. It seems that even if you don't have this type of setup it would be easier to transfer one archive file from the UNIX system to a PC than a whole bunch of smaller binaries after de-archiving them on the UNIX box. As I said before, if there is something I'm overlooking, please let me know. procedures
mjh@cs.vu.nl (Maarten J Huisjes) (02/17/90)
The main issue here is that whichever method is chosen, it has to run on
as many platforms as possible. Until now the only methods discused are,
originally, MSDOS compression methods. Why don't we use A Unix compression
method, like "compress" (.Z). This runs on a lot of platforms (I've got
a running version for MSDOS), Is public domain. If you don't have it
running on your PC uncompress before downloading and recompress with your
own favorite compression method.
--
Maarten Huisjes. (mjh@cs.vu.nl)
{seismo|decvax|philabs}!mcsun!botter!mjhts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) (02/17/90)
In article <1489@dfsun1.electro.swri.edu> robison@dfsun1.electro.swri.edu (Bob Robison) writes: > > 1) Where can I get a unix version of zoo? > 2) Where can I get the latest lharc for MSDOS & unix? > (I got lharc10e.com off of grape, but I had an older list > that showed lharc113 -- this wasn't on grape) The latest lharc we have for MsDos at chyde.uwasa.fi is (/pc/pd2)lh114b.exe. Sorry that I do not know the answers to your other questions offhand. ................................................................... Prof. Timo Salmi (Moderating at anon. ftp site 128.214.12.3) School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: gado::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun
jmerrill@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Jason Merrill) (02/18/90)
In article <225@emdeng.Dayton.NCR.COM> btrue@emdeng.UUCP (Barry.True) writes: >our PCs. It seems that even if you don't have this type of setup it would >be easier to transfer one archive file from the UNIX system to a PC than a >whole bunch of smaller binaries after de-archiving them on the UNIX box. As >I said before, if there is something I'm overlooking, please let me know. I don't want to transfer the binaries individually to my PC. I DO want to look at the documentation on-line before deciding if I WANT the program and taking the time to download the entire archive. This is much easier with ARC, ZOO or LHarc than it is with ZIP or COMPRESS. -- Jason Merrill jmerrill@jarthur.claremont.edu
fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith) (02/19/90)
Well, I don't think it matters which archiver we use for packing the distributed binaries. The whole problem can be avoided by using one of the utilities which creates a self-extracting archive. This can be done with ZIP, ZOO, and LHARC (at least). Sure, this makes the archive a bit bigger, but at least for ZIP and LHARC they are noticeably smaller anyway than ARC or ZOO files, so the little bit won't hurt us. The advantage of this is that it makes it easier for people who don't happen to have the particular favor of archiver we use to still use the distributed programs. As long as the moderator can handle a wide variety of formats, then he can easily re-pack the submissions into whatever form he decides to use on the group. I hereby vote (for whatever good it does) for using one of the self- extracting archiver formats. Fred Smith fredex@cg-atla.agfa.com
keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson) (02/21/90)
In article <8386@cg-atla.UUCP> fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith) writes: > >I hereby vote (for whatever good it does) for using one of the self- >extracting archiver formats. > >Fred Smith >fredex@cg-atla.agfa.com Humple Opimiom No. 341-A: Uh, excuse me, but: Self Extracting on WHAT machine/OS? I'd guess the reply would be "IBM-PC's, of course." What about all dem folks what wants to look at attum b4 they download from their news host to their IBM-PC/Clone? There are some archivers, I believe, that will allow the "master" archiving program to manipulate what is also a self extracting archive; that is the kind that would be required if, in fact, SEX (Self-EXtracting) archives are used. (Ain't ZOO one of these? I'm not sure...mumble, mumble.) kEITHe