Re: Slink-CD (Part III)
On Sun, Apr 11, 1999 at 07:41:22PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> 3. Does slink-cd really depend on lha? I hope a suggests line is
> sufficent since lha is still non-free. I've spoken with James
> Troup who told me that it's only used on Atari machines but they
> don't require it, it's only more convenient than gzip. So can we
> pleaes get rid of this dependency?
>
> Cc to the m68k-build crew by request.
Correction: Atari uses it 'for convenience', Amiga uses it as the only
reasonable packaging method. Most Amigas don't have 1.44 MB floppy drives,
the 720k drives are unreliable (that's what Amiga users told me) and
it's not really an option to install from 720 k floppies in that situation.
(BTW, that's all documented in the m68k install.{txt,html,pdf}, so I repeat
the argument just for brevity).
In case you missed that point: lha is a file _archiver_, not a compression
utility like gzip. gzip can't substitute for lha.
For slink-cd, lha is only used to unpack the lha archive into the atari/
or amiga/ directories? We can replace it with tar for that purpose (yet
another file to upload). I don't know if the same would work for Amiga. I
can repackage the Amiga stuff into a tarball for some Amiga user to try.
If it works (i.e. no magic permission bits get lost and Steve can burn a
CD using the tarball that Christian or someone else can use), I'll add it to
the slink boot-floppies source.
Getting rid of lha in boot-floppies means we need a Gnu tar for Amiga and
Atari (I think I've seen one for Atari). lha is by far the most popular
format in the Amiga and Atari community, I think. I don't see the point in
insisting on a different format (but then, I don't see the point in being
PC most of the time).
Feel free to ignore my opinion; I'm not going to build the potato boot
floppies anyway.
Michael
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