1.01 (26 May 91) added support for floppy disk drives which are not drive 1
1.1 (14 Oct. 91) the program was largely rewritten: more commands supporting more formats, a fully rewritten interface, and it's now MultiFinder aware and System 7.0 friendly.
1.2 (15 Feb. 1992) Preferences settings are now saved, we've added an options box, and more
1.2.1 (8 March 92)
1.2.2 (5 April 92)
1.3 (20 June 92) added support for POSIX tar multivolume archives. And it is much, much faster.
1.3.1 (18 July 92)
1.3.2 (31 Oct. 92)
1.3.3 (6 March 1993)
2.0 beta 12 (7 Jan. 1994)
-) it can open any volume (including non-mounted ones) and any SCSI device
-) can create tar archives as files on a regular Macintosh volume
-) can create MacBinary and BinHex 4.0 files
-) can extract uuencoded files
-) correctly converts MS-DOS text files
-) an "extension -> type&creator" table allows a better control of the file types
-) you may select files to be archived from a scrollable list, also with pattern match
-) it can place an empty MS-DOS filesystem on a floppy disk
-) "Extract from sector" is another way to select part of an archive
-) it supports pathnames longer than 99 characters
-) it may create a log file
-) a new dialog to set buffer sizes and other options
2.0.1 (10 July 94)
2.0.2 (4 Sept. 94)
2.0.3 (1 Nov. 94) added a uuencoder
2.0.4 (12 March 1995) may keep its preferences in a separate file (useful for sharing a single copy over a net) and may convert character codes >127
2.0.5 (24 June 95)
2.1 (10 Nov. 1996)
-) Recompiled with CodeWarrior for both 68000 and PowerPC
-) supports SCSI Manager 4.3
-) it now supports the 4 required Apple events
-) the conversion from an UNIX pathname to the Macintosh way of referring to a file and vice-versa was completely rewritten, getting rid of operations which were the old way to do things even under System 6
-) it's possible to access a remote tape via a MacTCP connection to a UNIX machine and using rexec to launch rmt (see separate documentation file)
-) it correctly sets the attributes of an extracted folder which had a System 7-style custom icon
-) it can optionally save all attributes of folders, in case you want to use suntar as a backup application rather than to exchange data with UNIX
-) a new dialog box tells suntar not to bother the user so often and apply a standard solution to typical problems
2.1.1 (19 Jan. 1997) added a retry count, a MIME decoder and AppleSingle/AppleDouble decoders
2.1.2 (12 April 97)
2.1.3 (19 Oct. 97) improvements in tape handling (a "Detect block size", now Append works also on tapes), does not block the Macintosh while working with slow SCSI devices (i.e. tapes).
2.1.4 (16 Nov. 97)
2.2 (13 Sept. 1998)
-) bug fixes (ugh, long names extraction in POSIX format had never, never worked: how couldn't anybody notice that earlier ?)
-) pattern matching in file names in tar extraction
-) text conversions (DOS->Mac, Win->Mac, Mac->DOS, Mac->Win, Mac->7 bit ASCII with clever handling of Italian accents)
-) IBM-ize may check for bad sectors and mark them
-) an option for default file format, one to delete the original encoded file after successful extraction and one to skip the selection of the destination folder (they all are useful to exploit suntar as automatic file format converter, e.g. under Netscape Navigator)
2.2.1 (22 November 98) a few bug fixes
Known bugs
It does not handle correctly multi-volume archives on devices opened by the "Open device" command.
It has an incompatibility with the hierachical Apple menu introduced with System 7.5 (Apple menu options) which may recheck the list of recent files, and that takes a lot of time. However, the bug is not ours, "Apple menu option" does the same silly thing also in other situations, e.g. after the failure of a disk initialization, and we could not find a way to avoid that. We've reported the problem to Apple, with no answer.
Compatibility
Our experience and/or letters from previous users have reported successful use of suntar in exchanging data with the following UNIX machines:
Sun SPARCstation 1, 1+, 2, IPC, IPX, 10
Sun 386i
IBM RISC/6000
NeXTstation
Solbourne S4000 (a SPARCstation clone)
HP 9000 model 370 with HP9122A or HP9153B drive unit
HP 715-50, HP9000/425T and HP9000/807S running Hp-Unix 9.01
a Macintosh IIfx running A/UX 3.0 (suntar can read/write its tar archives, I don't know whether it has problems running under it: suntar 1.3 could not find the floppy disk since its name is different under A/UX, suntar 2.0 may open a disk having any name but it was never launched under A/UX )
Only a couple of users reported problems (an HP 9000 and a 386 with SCO UNIX) but I couldn't identify the cause (defective hardware?).
Copyright notice
Suntar (Speranza's un-tar) is freeware, so you may freely distribute it and send it to other public domain archives, provided that the documentation and this file are kept with it. You may also include it in any shareware collection on floppy disk, CD-ROM or other means, at the same condition.
Suntar might die soon: we have no recent documentation from Apple, the subscription to the compiler has expired and we don't know how suntar will be able to fulfil the new "Carbon" requirements from Apple, nor how its low-level portions will behave under the new microkernel. The time we can employ for it is less and less: we love the Mac, but since neither of us could find a Mac-related job, we have scarce contacts with the Mac community. Anyway, as Gabriele says, using a Mac is the best way to detoxicate after long hours in touch with Windows: how is it possible that, with so much money at their disposal, Microsoft programmers can only do something which is so much below the Macintosh ? Something which is so obviously hard to use, not intuitive, unreliable, intrusive, and with such a poor style and a clumsy "feel" ?
All the routines for creating and extracting files in tar format, plus the MacBinary conversions were from the programs muntar 1.0 and mtar 1.0 ｩ Gail Zacharias 1988, whose source code is available in public domain. But with time, almost everything we had borrowed from those programs was modified and rewritten.
The PackIt extractions routines are from unpit 2 ｩ1986 Allan Weber (it's a UNIX program).
The routines for MS-DOS disks (IBM-ize and the test for sectors marked bad) are from mtools, a UNIX package by Emmet Gray.
The color icons were sent us by Mark Duffield who edited and colored the icons we had designed.
Suntar was written in Think-C 4.0.5 and 5.0; the 1.0 version used Symantec's ANSI standard library, but starting from the 1.1 version suntar has a user interface library of its own, built from demo programs by Symantec (MiniEdit.c) and Apple Computer (TESample.c), with a lot of original additions. Version 2.1 and later are now compiled with Metrowerks CodeWarrior, without exploiting its libraries.
Furthermore, we must thank all the users of suntar for their suggestions and their help in identifying problems: in particular, the tape support would have never worked without the help of beta testers and their patience in performing tests; Dominique Petitpierre was certainly the most helpful of them all.
The source code of suntar 2.0.5 had been available in the Apprentice 3 CD-ROM by Celestin Company, and it might be available in Internet some day. Well, suntar 2.1 and later are more sophisticated, you'll not get the source code.
You may help us to make suntar better by sending your bug reports, suggestions and questions to:
mail address:
Sauro & Gabriele Speranza
via Cappuccini 18
40026 Imola
Italy
(yes, it's the town where a Formula 1 grand Prix takes place and, sigh, where Ayrton Senna died)
