Re: Utility to write DOS 3.3 disks under GS/OS?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <c9bo4s$eaa$1@acme.gcfn.org>,
Dave Althoff Jr <dalloff@gcfn.org> wrote:
 
> For platform independent files, you're right...just use ZIP or GZIP and be
> done with it.  But there is a distinct advantage to using platform
> dependent archiving formats:  it makes no sense at all to unpack a
> Macintosh binary application on a PC, and likewise it is useless to unpack
> a Windows executable on MacOS or ProDOS.
 
Not always: you may be running Soft-PC on your Mac, or Executor on your
PC -- then you'll have use for executables for the "other" platform.
 
> This is why we have Shrinkit for ProDOS, Stuffit for MacOS, and PKZip
> for Windows.
 
...except that few Windows users use PKZip nowadays -- they use WinZip
instead.
 
Anyway, by that logic all the different flavors of Unix which are binary
incompatible with one another should each have an archive format of their
own.  Fortunately they don't -- they almost all use tar+gzip as their
archive format.
 
No, the reason those different platforms use different archive formats
isn't to be convenient to the users, but instead to try to "lock in"
the users to tone platform, for commercial reasons.
 
> You can look at the archive type and know what kind of a machine it is
> probably supposed to work on.
 
That functionality can be obtained in other ways: by comments in the
archive, or by giving the archive itself a file name indicating the target
platform.
 
If the target platform is to be indicated by the kind of archive file
selected, and you want to distribute the same data to all platforms,
then those same data need to be duplicated in multiple archives,
wasting space.  If different platforms could agree on one archive
file format, it would be enough to compress that platform independent
data once.
 
> I have, for instance, a CD that contains QuickTime movie files,
> HTML files, and two archives:  one is a Stuffit archive (.SEA), the other
> is a ZIP archive (.EXE) (yes, they are both self-extracting).  I can look
> at the filename and know which machine the archive is for, which is useful
> as the wrong archive won't even work.
 
....except that the .EXE extension merely tells you it's some kind of
executable file, not necessarily a self-extracting archive.
 
Self-extracting archives should be avoided since they're a security
threat: you can never know what code some unknown .EXE file contains.
And even if it originally was a self-extracting archive and nothing
else, it could have been infected with a virus.  With .ZIP files you
don't have that problem.
 
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