19 May
2005
19 May
'05
10:43 a.m.
On Thu, 19 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 07:34:24AM -0700, Vintage
Computer Festival wrote:
*Everything* is a proprietary binary format, and in the grand scheme
of things, compression is simply a binary encoding. That's why I
think damning a certain archiving program/format just because of the
platform it runs onis silly.
This misses the point entirely. With a ZIP archive you are munging the
raw data into something it is not. I guess if you wanted to be psycho you
could also consider ASCII to be a "proprietary binary format", but 40
years of history and standardization would disagree with you.
See Dwight's last reply re: archivist standards. Putting stuff in a ZIP
file is NOT archiving.
You can not plan on what is the next best
archival tool and you can't
please everyone. Use what you have and try to make it so most people can
handle it one way or another.
My suggestion is to stay away from proprietary compressed binary formats. I see people on the thread complaining about having to
bundle a
windows emulator with each archive. Excuse me? Let's look at some
popular formats: TAR, ZIP, RAR all have source-code unarchivers.
Which means they can run on any machine with a C compiler. So
what's with all the paranoia? Just use whatever works as long as
more than one major platform can extract it.
For now. What about 1 year from now? 5 years? 10 years? 50 years? 100
years? 500 years?
Think LONGTERM.
(Not directed at Sellam, just commenting on all thread
participants.)
Ain't no thang ;)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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