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Re: BootX and the Stuffit Fiasco.



On Thursday 22 February 2001 06:40, Ethan Benson wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 07:08:00PM -0600, Jonathan Wight wrote:
> > On 02/22/2001 17:49, "Ethan Benson" <erbenson@alaska.net> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 01:28:04PM -0500, Advertising wrote:
> > >
> > > all the problems you describe are the fault of Aladdin and thier
> > > proprietary crap product and monopolistic practices.
> >
> > 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 doubt that Stuffit 5 was directly targetted to damage MindExpander.
> > Stuffit 5 used a (at that time) new compression format that broke
> > compatibility with Stuffit 4 and therefore MindExpander. If you believe
> > that it was completely intentional then you probably also believe many
> > other conspiracy theories.
>
> stuffit 5 was not only made to damage mindvision, but i am certain the
> massive changes in the file format were done because they knew thier
> long proprietary format was cracked.  if they mean no harm to
> mindexpander then they would document thier fileformat.

Actually i think the main difference between stuffit 4 archives and stuffit 5 
archives was the fact that stuffit 4 still used the resource fork. its main 
advantage was archival and compression, stuffit 5 moved the focus to make 
stuffit very useful for cross platform compatability, but they're not the 
only ones that can do this well.

as i may have said before, compact pro archives store data pretty well in the 
data fork, and compatability is fairly high too, as stuffit expander has been 
able to expand .cpt for a long time. (plus compactpro is a smaller download 
than stuffit.. 6 now)

i still think the way to go is a binhexed self extracting archive, for 
compatability's sake.



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