To: DJ Delorie Cc: wcwelch AT waynar DOT lcec DOT lockheed DOT com, djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu, dank AT blacks DOT jpl DOT nasa DOT gov Subject: Re: new archiver for DJGPP distribution Date: Wed, 05 Aug 92 10:06:38 MDT From: dank AT blacks DOT jpl DOT nasa DOT gov >From: DJ Delorie >> 1) Will it be compatible with any other standard formats? >Probably not. I'd like to add support for comments, descriptions, and >empty directories into the packed file. >> 3) Will these sources be portable? >Probably not - I take advantage of DOS services to speed up the >processing. The format would be well documented, so writing an >alternative program will be no big deal. > >The requirements for a viable alternative are as follows: >(1) must be publicly available >(2) must default to unpacking the directory structure >(3) must be able to ship with commercial distributions of djgpp >(4) should support comments about the *archive* (available when listing) >(5) should support mutli-floppy unpacking >(6) should provide sources (GPL is best). To satisfy (2), (4), and (5), you could just ship a batch file that properly invoked a commonly available unarchiver. There are so many to choose from, one of them has got to satisfy (3)! In particular, I believe zoo 2.10 satisfies (1,3,4,6), and some work has been done on (5) but has not been released. The batch file approach would handle (2). It would be *much better* to work on improving zoo than to go and create a new, incompatible archive/compression format just for your own files, DJ, although we know you would do a great job. By the way, DJ, a very demanding professional programmer friend of mine recently started using djgpp, and said it was the only MSDOS C compiler he's ever used that he didn't keep finding bugs in. He's very happy with your port. (Yes, I am leaning on him to send in a contribution!) - Dan K. p.s. Benchmarks from comp.compression FAQ follow- I wish they also listed legal status in such a nice table. size lzrw3a compress lharc yabba pkzip freeze version: 4.0 1.02 1.0 1.10 2.3.2 options: -m300000 ------ ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ obj1 21504 12647 14048 10748 13859 10546 10453 obj2 246814 108040 128659 90848 114323 90130 85500 progc 39611 17919 19143 15399 17064 14164 14143 progl 71646 24358 27148 18760 23512 17255 17064 progp 49379 16801 19209 12792 16617 11877 11686 total3,141,622 1,400,105 1,259,141 1,200,580 1,159,340 1,141,821 1,109,290 real 0m35s 0m59s 5m03s 2m40s 5m09s user 0m25s 0m29s 4m29s 1m46s 4m04s sys 0m05s 0m10s 0m07s 0m18s 0m11s MSDOS: 1m39s zip zoo lha arj pkzip hpack comp-2 1.0 2.10 1.0(Unix) 2.30 1.93a 0.75a -9 ah 2.13(MSDOS) -jm -ex ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ obj1 10522 10312 10310 10333 10307 10572 10819 obj2 86661 84983 84981 82052 81213 80806 85465 progc 13955 13943 13941 13408 13363 13475 12896 progl 16954 16916 16914 16408 16148 16586 17354 progp 11558 11509 11507 11308 11214 11647 11668 total1,106,013 1,096,166 1,096,138 1,036,934 1,022,523 1,005,367 890,976 real 3m28s 4m07s 6m03s 1h22m17s 27m05s user 1m45s 3m47s 4m23s 1h20m46s 19m27s sys 0m11s 0m04s 0m08s 0m12s 2m03s MSDOS: 1m49s 2m41s 1m55s .zoo: zoo 2.10 (MSDOS) wuarchive.wustl.edu:/mirrors/msdos/zoo/zoo210.exe garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/arcers/zoo210.exe zoo 2.10 (Unix, VMS) wsmr-simtel20.army.mil:pd8:zoo210.tar-z [192.88.110.2] garbo.uwasa.fi:/unix/arcers/zoo210.tar.Z Contact: Rahul Dhesi