Dear All, I'd like to mention two aspects of self-extracting archives which no-one has touched on. These are, security and accessibility. I like "inanimate" zip (or gz/bz2 in my case) for two reasons which I consider to be important: 1. No executable code: I can open the most untrusted zip I care to choose and know that I am not going to get any viruses from the self-extraction code. It is not ideal to force people to actually execute untrusted code before they get to see what is really inside, as most self-extracting programs require. 2. No platform dependence: I don't want to have a fully set-up machine of the appropriate architecture and with a working copy of the target OS before I can extract the archive. I want to be able to peruse the latest win32 prime95 download on, say, an Alpha running BSD, or whatever. Now as it happens both of these issues are of reduced significance in the case of distributing a program (prime95) which people are intending to execute anyway, and a program that is architecture dependent. However, documentation and data files distributed with the main executable may need to be accessed separately, and as a general rule self-extracting archives are more of a gimmick than a valuable tool (although I don't dispute that they help in some cases by reducing the amount of user interaction required to extract them.) [Note that I am not saying anything about whether there is any performance improvement in the final execution etc. I am only commenting on the file format for downloads.] Finally, I'm curious about the compression being better than zip. I've been wondering for some time about when the Burrows-Wheeler compression in bzip2 would make its way onto Windows. Is this a first example of it? Yours, ======= Gareth Randall ======= _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
