X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mailnull set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 10:23:37 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: What features make WinZip a bad idea? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Sat, 23 Feb 2002, W Thex wrote: > > >One other ``feature'' is that WinZip converts text files to DOS CR-LF > > >format. That could wreak havoc on some semi-ASCII files. > > There is something that sound important. How would I know, if that > converstion took place? I have no idea, I stopped using WinZip long time ago. > And what "havoc" could it wreak? There are files that look like text, but aren't. Changing each LF to CR-LF corrupts those files, because they aren't meant for human consumption, where the end-of-line format doesn't matter. These files are meant for programs, and programs choke on extra characters where they don't expect them. One notable example of this breakage is some of the files in the Emacs distribution: converting them to CR-LF is known to break the build of Emacs in strange ways. IMHO, it's no business of an unzip program to do any changes in a file it extracts, unless the user explicitly asks for that.