| From: | Jim Peters |
| Date: | 6 Sep 2000 at 15:09:21 |
| Subject: | Re: AMIOPEN: AmiPak |
On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 08:36:36AM -0400, Steenbergh, Barry wrote:
> How does everyone feels about "on-the-fly" decompression? Such as where
> the file system automatically recognizes that a file is compressed and takes
> appropriate actions to uncompress it as it is read. This would let you do
> things like: 1>Superview MyPicture.GIF.amp and view the picture without
> having to unpack it first. Would this be "a good thing(tm)"?
Definitely. One of the most useful features of the `less' text-viewer
on Linux is that it can unpack .gz files (and loads of other
file-types) for you. This makes it very very easy to browse through
packed files, just as if they were plain unpacked files. This is
standard practice on Debian for all the documentation - I don't know
about Red Hat.
Also, it is interesting that the trend towards verbose file-formats
(like XML) means that it makes excellent sense to pack files as they
are written to disk, and unpack them as they are read. The Gnumeric
spreadsheet uses this approach, except that this is all done
transparently within the application using a library, rather than with
an external program. The `zlib' library handles this, and I guess
AmiPak is likely to provide something similar.
I hope AmiPak is not going to be reinventing the wheel, by the way -
there's a lot of good stuff out there already to draw on.
On another point, it is still slightly hazy how this Amiverse thing is
going to function. Perhaps the guys working on this have already
thought about how compression will fit into the overall structure,
because this is the kind of thing that the innocent user shouldn't
have to worry about too much. We're just looking at the first 2-3
floors of a multi-storey office block at the moment. Any thoughts on
this ... ?
Jim
P.S. Maybe "entertainment complex" rather than "office block", but I
don't know many multi-storey entertainment complexes.
P.P.S. I'm not under an NDA, so you guys may know things I don't ...