Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1996/10/18/06:35:46
On Thu, 17 Oct 1996, John M. Aldrich wrote:
>> >From PKZIP products only version 2 supports it. And I know many people that
>> still use version 1 of PKZIP which will refuse to unpack such archives.
>
>Odd... seems to me that the latest PKZIP version has been out for
>sufficiently long that everyone should have it by now. I mean, the
I thought so also. But it seems that there are many surprises out there...
>> I also that PKZIP doesn't see files in package that are stored with filenames
>> in lower case. Facing that, I'd opt for an SFX ZIP archive that'd contain in
>> addition to all necessary for install files, a copy of InfoZip's UNZIP
>> utility. The latter is much more convenient to use as it does process ALL zip
>> archives.
>
>I wasn't aware that PKZIP cared beans about the case of files. If you
>are running on an LFN-based system, you may run into some slight
>troubles, but upper/lower case should only matter if there are two files
>in the archive whose names are identical except for the case. And if
>that's the case (pardon the pun), then there's a major problem with the
>archive to begin with; i.e., it's not intended for MS-DOS systems
>period.
I saw the problem with some files packed with InfoZip's ZIP. I use DCC as a
replacement for NC at home and it uses external utilities to look into
archives. When I installed PKUNZIP as a utility to extract files, I
found that sometimes I miss some files from the display! And they weren't
unpacked also. The only cause I could think of was unability of PKUNZIP to
extract some files with mixed case. Perhaps I'm wrong and there was another
cause. But there's another thing. Take RHIDE source package. I guess it will
some day become a part of DJGPP distribution and yet it uses LFNs in the
package. DOS PKUNZIP doesn't support LFN in archives at all. InfoZip's UNZIP,
OTOH, silently truncates them making sensible names.
>There's a difference between not knowing anything about the compiler and
>not knowing how to extract a zipfile. I mean, how difficult is it to
>download something called 'install.exe', run it, and then run the
>'install.bat' file that it contains?
Not difficult at all ;-)
>I hadn't thought about the CD-ROM before, but it introduces several
>different issues to the table anyway. Given the vast amount of storage
>possible on a CD-ROM, it would be child's play to include _all_ the
>djgpp files on the CD and have a custom install program that asks the
>user what packages to copy to the HD and intalls them itself. Of
>course, you wouldn't have the installer in an archive - it should be
>right there in the root directory of the CD, accompanied by CWSDPMI.EXE
>and any other programs (like djverify) needed for the process, and it
>should copy itself in the process of installation. Heck, you could put
>half the SimTel archives on the CD-ROM and still have room to put in
>Emacs and f2c, and you'd have to either write a separate installer for
>each one or have the main one handle that as well. My point is that a
>CD-ROM based distribution is a whole different kettle of fish.
Yes that's totally different case. And probably DJGPP will be ready-to-go from
the CD anyway (of course with all the install stuff also included)
>Look, even if the installer were just packaged in a plain .ZIP archive,
>it would include all those above files. Whoever said _anything_ about
>making users download each program individually? That's insane!
I'm sorry. I think I went a little crazy about all that. I guess it really
doesn't matter what form shall we use to distribute it. I just have bad
experiences with users that claim to know anything about computers and yet are
unable to do anything that is out of scope of their, say, "DOS for Dummies" or
whatever. I saw people after programming courses that couldn't unzip a package
using other tool than PKUNZIP! Really! So, once again I'm sorry for being such
a pain in the neck about all that. I just want to make it the most intuitive
and troubleless as possible.
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Yesterday starts tommorow, tommorow starts today,
The problems always seem to be
we're picking up the pieces on the ricochet
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