18 May
2005
18 May
'05
2:04 p.m.
On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 13:44 -0700, Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
While I agree with the rar thing, I'm going to disagree below.
From: "Jim
Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org>
---snip---
For years I've used RAR (WinRAR for windows,
RAR and RAR32 for
---snip---
Hi
It seems that may of you are missing the point. The archives
are intended to be useable in say 500 years ( moved to
future media ). Any proprietary application like WinRAR
is useless for this purpose. I use ZIP files all the time but I would not use any
of
this stuff for the purpose of archiving. I surely wouldn't
even consider a window application for archiving.
Even things like error correction need to have their
descriptions in the archive file. Do you expect to package
a X86 simulator and WinRAR into a HTML like format with
each of these compressed files? Back to reality folks!
Dwight
Two things have to be taken into account, however:
* how practical is it to use the archive?
Putting it into a currently-standardish format is acceptable for the
medium term. There is no format which will withstand eternity, so as
long as it can be used NOW and for the foreseeable future it can be
converted later. Zip files (or tar) won't be around forever, but how
long has it been since you could buy half of the machines we've all got?
(heh, its been more than 10 years...) So while the format may become
obsolete, its not going to disappear overnight.
* how far does one have to go before you've gone to far?
That's a bit zen, but I think its an important question to ask.
Brian