ANNC: New compression library and application

[fadden@netcom.com (Andy McFadden)]

I'm pleased to announce the alpha release of NuLib2, a command-line file
archiver.  NuLib2 differs from similar utilities in two significant ways:

 - it's meant for use with Apple II NuFX (ShrinkIt) archives
 - it's built on top of a library, NufxLib, that does almost all of the work

The NufxLib library provides a complete set of archive functions, including
add, extract, verify, list, delete, and rename.  All of the write operations
use a transaction-oriented interface, so you can queue up a series of write
operations and then execute them with a single pass through the archive.

NuLib2 has a number of advantages over its predecessor (NuLib), including
the ability to preserve ProDOS file type information on files extracted to
"typeless" filesystems (e.g. FAT under Win32 and the typical UNIX fs).  You
could, for example, tell NuLib2 to extract an archive under Win98,
converting text files to "CRLF" format and appending ".TXT" to all files of
type TXT.  This makes it easy to browse old documents from Windows Explorer.

NufxLib comes with some sample applications, including a command that
converts between ShrinkIt ".SDK" disk archives and the ".2MG" format used
by Apple II emulators.


The NuLib2 application and NufxLib library are distributed as source code
under terms of the GNU General Public License and GNU Library General Public
License, respectively.

NuLib2 was developed under Linux, and has been run on a variety of systems
including SunOS 4, BeOS, and Win98.

Source code and Win32 binaries are available from http://www.nulib.com/
(users of crufty browsers try http://www.spies.com/~fadden/nulib/).  A
manual for NuLib2 and the API documentation for NufxLib are available
from the same location.

Version 0.5.0 is neither an "almost done" release nor a "completely done"
release.  This is alpha-quality code, meaning that it is complete and has
no known bugs, but has not been extensively tested.

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