| From: | Matthew J Fletcher |
| Date: | 3 Sep 2000 at 14:19:15 |
| Subject: | RE: AMIOPEN: Compressed archive formats |
Hi,.
> > Is Amiga going to decide on a 'preferred' archive format?
> >
> > Looking through the contributions to ftp.amiga.com lists, there are so many
> > different formats in use, zip, tgz, lha, bzip2, etc., that it can be a bit
> > of a pain remembering which command/arguments need to be used to extract
> > the files you want.
Whilst that makes it look nicer it defeats any chance of new technology being
used,
for example aminet still needs lha files that unix lha can read (so not the
newset
amiga ones). There are a many file formats with better compression, all of
which should
be used but they cant, because rules made years ago need to be stuck to.
> I agree. The same goes for file formats.
> The Amiga OE is multiformat, so even "document.readme" will cause problems on
> other platforms.
So what, ?, if a user is to dumb to open a file from a text viewer (or make a
filetype
association) rarther then relying on just clicking on it then they will never
be able
to cope with any new format and will be stuck in the past.
> What we need are some standard formats for all systems and keep it the same.
What ever one you chose it will be out of date, what you need is an improved
datatypes
interface so you can use any filetype you want and it will be translated by the
system
so all applications can r/w them.
>From a programmers view that also makes life dramaticly easyer.
Micro$oft defined there 'standard' BMP format for bitmaps, over a decade ago
and everybody
still has to put up with rubbish compression beacuse of it.
In the fastest moveing industry ever created, if you set anything in stone its
only
a matter of time before you are punnished for it, i refer to choices made about
any
definitions, object formats, sound, movie, graphics, 3d objects, etc ..
regards,
---
Matthew J Fletcher amimjf@connectfree.co.uk
Serck Controls Ltd NPD Firmware
www.amimjf.connectfree.co.uk ICQ amimjf 44193496
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