Re: DOS 3.3 File Compression

[schmidtd <schmidtd@my-deja.com>]

On Dec 4, 12:58 pm, Doug McComber <doug.mccomber+c...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> [...] is considered the common
> practise?  I ask because, as it pains me to admit it, I was a Commodore
> kid growing up and don't know the defacto methods for Apple II's.
Yeah, me too. :-)  And I think there are a couple of schools of
thought on this - and it seems to depend somewhat on the length of
time you've been in the community.

There is the .shk/.bxy/.sdk crowd with physical hardware connected in
some way to the real world.  The .shk/.bxy/.bsc/.sdk are natural means
of working natively with individual files in ProDOS and fairly large
volumes (i.e. hard drives).  Tools like ShrinkIt, etc. make it easy to
decompress things in situ.  Similarly, CiderPress (Windows only) makes
it easy to decompress those packages on modern computers as well; but
then you have the need to transport an individual file or files down
to the Apple in order to make it useful.

Then there is the latecomer crowd, perhaps brought up on emulators.  A
more natural mode of transfer for them is the whole-disk(ette) image,
which makes files on it immediately visible once mounted.  Zipped
whole-disk images are easy to unzip and drop on the emulator of
choice, for example.  So even transferring a single file is easy with
the common envelope of the .dsk or .po wrapper.

So I think you have (at least) two common use cases here.  That's
reflected in the file repository sites like ground and asmiov -
there's a mishmash of .zip, .gz, .bxy, .dsk, .sdk, .shk... did I get
them all?? :-)