Re: BootX and the Stuffit Fiasco.
> > With all respect, that is nonsense. Any problems are the fault of whoever
> > originally picked Stuffit for packaging free software. No one is making you
> > use Stuffit. If you don't like that format then you're free to find
> > something you do like, reverse engineer it or write your own replacement
> > from scratch.
>
> its true that BenH should not have used .sit, but i was simply
> explaining why .sit is the way it is.
I don't think BenH should have used anything other than .sit, from a pure
user perspective. StuffIt is the de facto archiver on MacOS for all I
know. If BenH had released BootX as a bunch of .bin files (or a tarball of
those) people would have asked for it to be packaged as .sit.
The problem is only with incorporating BootX into the Debian install
files, and here we can indeed convert all files to MacBinary format once
and have mkhybrid properly install them on the HFS part of the install CD
if necessary. But I doubt that was the original question.
The question was 'why can't you package all install files as .sit'. My
take on it: this would add an undue burden on the boot-floppies
maintainer. It's manual work, and requires a Mac with MacOS installed.
The politically correct answer: we cannot make boot-floppies depend on a
non-free tool like StuffIt for its operation. And the chance of ever
getting a free (as in speech) StuffIt packager for Debian are practically
nil as you pointed out rather convincingly.
Sorry, but that's what we get for supporting Linux on closed hardware, for
which most commercial software is written by companies with a mathing
mindset. Petition Alladin to open their file format.
Michael
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