| From: | Jim Peters |
| Date: | 6 Sep 2000 at 16:14:44 |
| Subject: | Re: [RE: AMIOPEN: AmiPak] |
On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 10:16:04AM -0400, Gregory Roberts II wrote:
> Well, I'm going to nit-pick a little bit and point out there are
> situations that a "sane average user" might care what a compressed file
> is, so it shouldn't be completely transparent.
>
> Depending on what I'm doing, I might want to put a whole bunch of files
> together for storage or transmission, just to keep everything together.
> If this case, I would care at least somewhat about dealing directly with
> the compressed bundle.
The most user-friendly way I know of handling compression from a user
perspective is to simply give them a tool to compress directories in
place, converting `my_folder/' into `my_folder.tgz' (or .amp or .zip
or whatever). If they choose to unpack it again, then everything
should be exactly as they left it - dates, links, everything.
If the user is doing it, then it should definitely be this easy. If
the tool can't at least do this for them, then it needs fixing.
Also, if they rename `my_folder.tgz' to `another_folder.tgz',
unpacking it should result in a directory `another_folder/'. None of
this nonsense of ZIP dumping 100 files in the wrong place because you
happened to be in the wrong directory - that is not very
user-friendly.
I have bash-scripts that achieve this under Linux (with gzip, tar,
cpio etc). If an Amiga-packer can make it this easy and fool-proof
for the user, then this is very good news.
Jim