Re: .sit files
On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 12:55:26AM -0400, Michael D. Crawford wrote:
> It's not just that you _should_ unpack BootX on the Mac side, it's that
> you have to.
No you don't. When I bought my Mac second hand, it had a _minimal_ install
of MacOS 9 on it. When I say minimal, I mean no web browser, no ftp client,
no network anything except the TCP/IP control panel and quicktime (which
could stream from http). (I'm no macos expert, I just bought it for the
quad PPCs :)
I was able to use my x86 linux machine to make an HFS floppy with the forks
and creator type set right to install niftytelnet+ssh, and something that
could handle stuffit. hfsutils includes some useful stuff for this. I
think I used hcopy, which can extract macbinary files onto an hfs volume,
setting up the forks and the creator and type fields.
I think I ended up doing some stuff with hattrib before I got things to work.
> It is a Mac OS application, and therefore has a filetype,
> creator code, and resource fork. While you might be able to extract the
> bitstreams of all these (and the data fork), they won't do you much good.
It's not hard if you use hcopy. Just don't actually mount the FS with the
kernel, let hcopy deal with it.
> What is a more serious concern is the use of a proprietary compression
> format in Free Software. If you just compress the normall way with
> Stuffit or Stuffit Lite, it will use an undocumented proprietary archive format.
Agreed! They should use macbinary, or gzipped macbinary (since most people
have an extractor capable of handling gzip).
> While you may get good compression, this is probably not what debian wants.
>
> I'm not sure, but I think if you select the option to create a "Stuffit
> 1.5.1 archive", then that format is documented. Don't take my word for
> it though. You won't get as good a compression as the latest Stuffit
> can do but BootX is small enough that it doesn't matter.
I remember searching for a non-proprietary option here, and I think there
are progs that can handle old stuffit archives.
> What I'd like to see is a compression format like bzip2 that provides
> for multiple data streams and attributes. I believe bzip2 has already
> been ported to the BeOS, which has file attributes (extra data streams
> you can associate with a file); I'm not sure that the BeOS bzip2
> compresses these but I _do_ know that the BeOS Zip does, it's just that
> Zip isn't as good a compression as bzip2.
For binary files, bzip2 gets almost as good compression as gzip. It's a
lot slower to extract, so for binary files where the compression is almost
the same it's not really worth the extra savings. Also, most progs handle
gzip, but most non-Unix stuff won't handle bzip2. It seems silly to make
people download another program just to get bootx. OTOH, it will expose
more people to good compression programs, and hopefully get stuff like that
in wider use.
BTW, you seem to be talking about some special bzip2 implementation that
adds some kind of multiple file handling. The bzip2 I'm familiar with is
the same one that's in the debian package. It only handles a single
stream/file. A .bz2 only extracts to a single file. If that file is a
macbinary archive (which would be the best way to implement the scheme,
IMHO), then it will handle multiple files. I guess the implementation of
bzip2 you've used integrates the multiple-file handling and the compression,
like tar z or tar j does.
> Here's a project for someone. Use a cross-platform application
> framework like, say, ZooLib at http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ and make a
> compressor/extractor that is as nice to use as Stuffit and Stuffit
> extractor are on the Mac. Use an open format like bzip2 and compression
> source code that is gpl'ed like bzip2's is and create a compressor that
> can compress multiple data streams for one file and create standard
> formats that will handle any platforms files (POSIX with permissions,
> symlinks, device files, BeOS BFS with attributes, Mac OS with resource
> forks etc.). That would make a nice project for someone and be a truly
> useful thing.
Umm, just use tar + bzip2 on Unix, macbinary + bzip2 on MacOS. BeOS must
have some archive format that saves anything they have in addition to posix
file types, I wouldn't know since I don't use BeOS. Assuming there is a way
to create an archive that saves everything needing saving, without any other
compression, on BeOS, just bzip2 that.
The only work one would need to do would be to create a driver/wrapper
program for all this stuff with a consistent interface, if that's what
you're looking for.
--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
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