| Leonard Rosenthol on Wed, 11 Jul 2001 12:00:08 -0400 |
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At 9:43 AM -0400 7/11/01, Jeff Abrahamson wrote: Mea culpa on the license, but see
> 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) You can use private header information in the zip archive format to handle attribute information - BUT that won't help you with some other things. First, Zip archives only store names in ASCII - which means that any OS and/or file system that deal with Unicode names is out of luck when archiving. Second, when using the private blocks in ZIP, you only get one set per file - which means that you could only have Mac OS OR Unix (for example). So what happens with something like Mac OS X, where you need to store BOTH Mac OS AND Unix metadata. And finally, the info is only useful if standardized and supported (and in the case of the Mac OS info, there are (currently!) 4 competing private structures!). Very true - though we talked a lot about it! Jean-Louis (Gassée, founder of Be) and I are old friends and we had a number of chats about porting StuffIt to the BeOS. It simply wasn't high enough priority for them to get us the necessary hardware/software and information in the early days - and by the time it was available, the platform was pretty much "in the toilet". (don't get me wrong, I STILL think that BeOS has some VERY COOL features, but that doesn't sell product).But timing is all: StuffIt was there first for MacOS, and they weren't there at all for BeOS.
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