Standard archivers (Was: Let's have ONE standard lharc!)

[Kent Paul Dolan]

>Johan Vromans <jv at mh.nl> writes:

> Since a good, reliable, portable archiver like zoo or lharc is a very
> [valuable resource to the net, let's work on one.] A dedicated
> newgroup or maling-list would be the first step.

xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:

> Please feel free to use comp.sys.amiga.datacomm for such a discussion;
> archiving, compression, and data sharing techniques are all explicitly
> part of its charter, and are all reasonably platform independent
> questions, by their very nature.

 russell at ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell J Fulton;ccc032u) writes:

> Yes but will most of us think of looking there. I am not interested in
> Amigas (I am sure they are fine machines I just don't have access to
> one, nor do I have the time for idle curiosity :-(.) and have
> unsubscrided the comp.sys.amiga hierarchy.

That's probably why I keep posting this same invitation everywhere I see
this question arise. Having conducted not one, but two net votes, for a
total of 13 newsgroups, I can recommend it mostly as a pain to be
avoided where possible. Since a group with modest traffic exists in
which such conversations would be appropriate and welcome, is it out of
line to recommend that it be used for that purpose? Surely resubscribing
to one newsgroup can't be that big a trial?

I will freely admit to having included comp.sys.amiga.datacomm in the
Amiga hierarchy reorganization partially with malice aforethought to
make up for the lack of a group anywhere on the net focusing on data
compression, since I tried to get such a discussion rolling this past
summer at the time of the great LZ compression patent ballyhoo with only
a little, short term success.

I'm utterly convinced that current reverseable, general purpose
compression technology is nowhere close to the limits of efficient
compression, just because the results on image data are so far below
potential. It may be that useful research work can be done in this
discipline over the net, but that remains an open question.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>