19 May
2005
19 May
'05
12:40 p.m.
From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf at siconic.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 2:14 PM
On Thu, 19 May 2005, Randy McLaughlin wrote:
Bandwidth and disk space is cheap if someone else is paying for it ;-)
Packaging archives is useful for so many reasons:
Effort of copying the data to the server and creating an organized
structure, anyone that's been to my site knows how much effort I need to put
into organizing it as is without adding more to do.
Downloading whole chunks rather than piecemeal helps to preserve the data.
No matter the cost packaged files take up 10% of the needs of unpackaged
material. I still use dial-up at my house so it would be impractical for me
and others to handle the 1000% increase in upload/download times.
I do not have a perfect answer, I try to accommodate as many as is
reasonably possible.
Randy
www.s100-manuals.com
This means that the only systems that can not
extract the archival data
meant for classic computers are the classic computers themselves :-(.
Limiting the archives to the tools available for the machine it is meant
for
would exclude the people that need it most, "Windoze only" users need to
have their hands held to get started. I expect people with 20-30 years
of
computer experience to be able to handle both classic & current tools.
Why does this even need to be so? Can't you offer a ZIP archive if that's
what you insist on, but also just have a link to a directory right next to
the ZIP download link that has the contents of the archive uncompressed?
It seems this would solve everyone's problem, and also make the archive
more stable for the longterm.
I have some archives that are archives of
archives and intend to go back
and
extract the original archives into un-packaged treed directories then
repackage into just a zip format so that future users don't have to
figure
out the zip format to then have to figure out the myriad of CP/M
packaging/squeeze formats.
Why bother packing it at all? Just leave it in it's unadultered original
format. Bandwidth and disk space is cheap, and is only getting cheaper.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
Festival
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