On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 10:28:49AM -0200, Branden wrote:
> In http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-OSD.html#B they describe platform/cpu standard
> names, and we'll definetly need those for checking target architecture. Can
> we standardize upon those, or there's something missing? There's an issue
The info-zip home page has a list of things unzip runs on, which effectively
gives a very comprehensive list of OS types:
http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/UnZip.html
the link to C-Kermit at the foot of the page reveals a large list of Unix
variants:
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/unix.html
[The zip file "spec" is on infozip's pages:
http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/doc/appnote-iz-latest.zip
the gzip file format is rfc1952 <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1952.txt>
the deflate compression method used by gzip is rfc1951
<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt>
zip files can use a variety of compression methods - deflate is method 8.
As best I can tell only deflate and storing uncompressed (method 0) are
widely used nowadays.
In theory there's nothing stopping you putting a bzip2 stream (or whatever
arj or rar or any of the other archivers use) inside a zip archive if you
standardise on the compression method number.
Notice also the distinction - zip an archive format (put lots of files in
one file and take them out again) which allows entries to be compressed.
tar is just an archive format, gzip just a compression system.
how very unix - combine small tools to get a job done :-)
]
Nicholas Clark
