Backbone automatic news-compression question ...

[James R. Van Artsdalen]

In article <857 at ho95e.UUCP>, wcs at ho95e.UUCP (#Bill_Stewart) writes:
> ...
> compress.  Two comments: for PC programs, the most popular compression
> seems to be ARC, which is shareware.  Compress is PD, its behavior
> is better known, and source is available from mod.sources; is there
> any reason to prefer ARC?  Also, the "btoa" program that comes with ...

Until recently ARC underwent constant revisions that were incompatible with
each other.  To the best of my knowledge no new versions have shown up in the
last few months (aside from some Trojan Horses).  A major problem with ARC
is that the program isn't available in a completely portable C version yet.
I acquired the pseudo-C source for the MS-DOS with the dreams of porting it
to portable C, but quit after realizing how much was involved.  The compiler
it uses uses a totally incompatible preprocessor, and the program has many
byte-ordering dependancies and size assumptions.  It also places fast and loose
with memory allocation.  Given the fact that revisions have come out so
frequently in the past I would hope no one would use it to post a large
source or anything, because it could prove difficult for the PC owners to
extract the data from it, much less owners of any other machines.
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen    ...!ut-ngp!utastro!osi3b2!james    Live Free or Die