Re: Uploading to Asimov

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

In comp.sys.apple2 Bill Garber <willy46pa@comcast.net> wrote:
>> I'm a little more annoyed about ".rar" files appearing in the archive,
>> since that's harder to deal with than .gz or .zip.  .gz can be opened
>> directly by some emulators, and .zip is supported directly by WinXP,
>> but .rar requires an application.
> 
> Seems my XP handles RAR ok, and doesn't have ZIP capability. What's
> up with that? I can't even make a ZIP file so the Win98 machine here can
> use it. Is there something I need to switch on to get ZIP format?

I know that WinXP "Professional" has "Zip Folders", i.e. Zip files show
up like folders that can be traversed.  Not sure about other versions of
WinXP.

Most formats can be handled by 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/), but
emulators and CiderPress are not likely to handle the vast collection
of different archiving formats directly.  If you want to bundle up a
large collection of disk images to send to somebody, the "solid" modes
of .rar and .7z provide an advantage, but for single disk images it's
not buying much.

Handling .gz is trivial with zlib, and .zip is only slightly harder
when you're only interested in the first file (it also uses zlib for
the compression code).

The real advantage of the compressed formats, IMHO, is less about
compression and more about having a CRC on the files.  That takes
the guesswork out of whether or not the images are damaged.

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