WRT .sit, .sea, etc.
At the risk of stating the obvious, (and getting flamed), the Mac OS,
prior to X
identified files by type and creator parameters which are lost when a
file is
transfered by a non-Mac aware process. While a .sea (self extracting
archive)
is an executable, a Mac won't know this unless the type is set to Appl.
This can
be done by Resedit and other programs. Of course this still leaves the
chicken
& egg problem of installing a Mac file from a non-Mac system.
A data file, such as a Stuffit archive, can be opened from within a
stuffit aware
program without setting the correct type creator. Later versions of the
Mac OS
came with an extension/control panel to deal with "foreign" files.
HTH, Greg