On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 10:59:56PM -0800, Tovar wrote: > StuffIt (and its relatives) have been a thorn in the side of Mac free > software providers nearly since a Mac first had a SCSI interface. The > self-extracting archives must have been invented so that commercial > software developers could distribute the code and/or updates in a form > that was easily downloadable without forcing their customers to buy > someone else's software. Alladin usually (but not always) has provided > an alternative decompress-only program, without the de-BINHEX part, so > you could to take the posting (or archive file), run it through EMACS > or something else that could take arbitrarily large files, and then run > it through their stripped down program, which, at times, would only > decompress in place. Basically, they made people's life sufficiently > difficult that those who didn't have strong principles against either > stealing software, or buying into the 'shareware' game, sent in their > checks. One of many reasons i stopped using the Mac for things that > it wasn't especially good at once LINUX came out. indeed, this is one mess i have VERY happy to be rid of. > I believe that there's a MacGZip (or something like that), but i'm not > sure it knows how to write Mac resource forks. I sure hope *something* > can be provided that avoids requiring one to get some StuffIt variant. > I don't mind of people distribute self-extracting archives, just don't > expect/force the users to have to deal with a commercial vendor. now that MacOS is being obsoleted by OSX nothing special is needed anymore, good ol tar and gzip will do quite nicely. (OSX installs onto UFS so the resource fork crap must be going away) whats really ammusing is aladdins OSX expander is so bad that Apple tells users to use the `OpenUP' program to extract .tar.gz files they provide (dev tools and whatnot), and if that is not available then to use the command line tar and gzip utilities. IOW apple is suggesting *CLI* tools over aladdins broken pile of crap to MacOSX users. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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