Jeff Abrahamson on Wed, 11 Jul 2001 10:00:06 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] Archive formats (was Re: StuffIt for Linux and Solaris)


On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 09:07:54AM -0400, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> At 6:31 AM -0400 7/11/01, Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
> >Binhex you can get around. Pkzip, for example, understands binhex
> 
> 	No it doesn't.  WinZip does, I believe, but PKZip doesn't. 
> And of course, both of those are on the Windows platform - not Linux. 
> But yes, BinHex is no big deal - there are a number of tools that can 
> handle it.

Mea culpa on the license, but see

    <http://freshmeat.net/projects/pkzipforlinux/>

Here's a GPL option:

    <http://freshmeat.net/projects/uudeview/>


> 	FYI: One nice thing that StuffIt does on non-MacOS platforms 
> when it decodes BinHex (and MacBinary, etc.) is to offer the option 
> of "reencoding" into either AppleSingle or AppleDouble - which is 
> GREAT for servers that are then file-system mounted on a Mac.   Even 
> cooler, is that the Windows version of StuffIt can deal with NTFS 
> "forks" and can save/restore Mac shares on an NT server.

Nice feature, although I bet this could be done with two steps. But I
won't quibble.


> >and has a way nicer license than Alladin's closed source solution above.
> 
> 	Huh?  PKZip is a closed source implementation.  Perhaps you 
> are thinking of the InfoZip (<http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/>) 
> implementation of the Zip file format which was created by Phil Katz 
> (PK).

Egg. Oops. See above.

May RMS have mercy on my soul... ;-)


> >  But .sit files are a pain, and Alladin's done a good job of
> >convincing Mac users that sit is the only way to go.
> >
> 	I have news for you - technically it is!  The StuffIt archive 
> format is the only one that can completely save & restore all aspects 
> of a Macintosh file and/or directory structure.  For that matter, 
> it's also the only format that can completely save & restore all 
> aspects of a Windows or Unix file/directory.  (NOTE: gnutar does 
> pretty good for Unix, but doesn't handle Windows or Mac)

It was, I'm not sure it is. For example, BeOS ended up using a free
zip implementation to handle there attribute stuff. I rather imagine
if zip could handle attributes it can handle resource forks and Finder
attributes. But timing is all: StuffIt was there first for MacOS, and
they weren't there at all for BeOS.

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>



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