18 May
2005
18 May
'05
9:46 p.m.
From: "Patrick Finnegan" <pat at computer-refuge.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 10:45 PM
Randy McLaughlin declared on Wednesday 18 May 2005
10:26 pm:
Personally I like TAR.
I use self extracting archives because if you are computer literate the
instructions printed on the download page should tell you what it takes to
extract it.
If you are a windoze user with you head up where the sun doesn't shine it
just works.
It works for the largest base, even for those that are just now ready to
learn.
I am not advocating winzip as a perfect system, just a system that fits my
personal desire to spread archives to as many as want to download them.
Randy
www.s100-manuals.com
Lately I've been using self-extracting zip
files. The reason is that
just by renaming the file from *.exe to *.zip most decompressors
handle it just fine and for 99% of the people it includes the software
to decompress it.
So, to fan the flames, what's wrong with tar? There's a lot more
machines I know of that can easily handle tar files than zip files...
Even WinZip can decompress tar files... while I still had a running
Windows machine, I used WinZip to decompress tar files several times.
Plus, tar is an (intentionally) open format; gnu tar is available for
lots of different platforms, and it's even easy to write your own tar
extractor.
Especially for long term archiving, I think that things like simple, open
formats are more important than making sure that everyone's grandma can
figure out how to use the archive... ie, assuming that the person has a
grasp of being able to learn new things, and some idea of logic are IMO
reasonable assumptions.
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org