These little things...

[Shawn McMahon]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 03:19:21AM +0200, Vincent Trouilliez said:
> 
> Anyway, I rarely get to deal with RAR files in practise, no it never
> bothered me that much.
> I wonder why this format is still around. With broadband and cheap large
> disks, inventing a new compression format just to compress maybe little
> bit more, is hardly worth the trouble IMHO. 

The thing about RAR is, it can compress some things that ZIP can't.  And
not everybody has broadband; especially outside the US.  There are still
people in very large developed countries who not only have dialup, but
they have dialup over crappy phone lines that won't do 56k and they pay
by the minute for local calls.  There are still millions of people in
the USA that have dialup, and that's not even counting people using
cellular connections, which are growing.

I agree with you in principle, but RAR is one that's not going anywhere
anytime soon.  I once wrote an article for Fidonews about the various
archivers available at the time, which was shortly after RAR was
introduced.  My conclusion was that Fidonet should switch to ZIP because
the benefits of it over ARC were significant, but the benefits of other
formats weren't compelling enough to change.  Last I checked, they were
still mandating ARC compatibility for all members.  You have to go with
what your audience is using sometimes.  As long as there are still large
numbers of people in certain countries and user segments using RAR,
we're stuck with it; even if it's mostly used for compressing illegal
copies of TV shows.  Some argue against continuing to use tar, now that
zip is available for pretty much everything.  And why support gzip, when
compress does a pretty good job and has to be there anyway for backwards
compability.

IMHO, we should be conservative in what we send, and liberal in what we
receive; that means we should use tar and gzip for anything that's only
going to go to Linux systems, ZIP for things that might conceivably go
to Windows systems, and ship tools to handle unarchiving any weird
format we can sucker...er, CONVINCE somebody to maintain packages for.

On Windows, if you click on a file and the system doesn't know what to
do with it, it offers you the option of selecting what program to use,
or letting the shell talk to Microsoft's web site to determine what
program to use.  We should be doing that; not because Windows does it,
but because it's good interface design IMHO.


-- 
   Shawn McMahon    | Ubuntu: an ancient African word meaning "I am sick
   EIV Consulting   | of compiling Gentoo".
 http://www.eiv.com |                       - Jeff Waugh (paraphrased)
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