[tex-live] volunteer to implement lcab compression?

[Manfred Lotz]

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 21:18:17 +0200
Olaf Weber <olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl> wrote:

> Manfred Lotz writes:
> > On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 19:33:55 +0200
> > Thomas Esser <te at dbs.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
> 
> >>> We (Sebastian and I) have not found any other programs to write
> >.cab>> files under Unix (many programs support reading .cab's). 
> >There is a
> 
> >> Is the file format good enough to preserve file attributes such as
> >> UNIX permissions? 
> 
> > Cab format is intended for Windows platform. Therefore it doesn't
> > know about permissions and ownership. 
> 

.....

> 
> All of which taken together means that there is no really suitable
> place to put additional per-file data in a CAB file -- you'd have to
> resort to indirect methods like packaging an additional "file" with
> the data.
> 
> In all it is not a very good distribution format for unix-like
> systems.
> 

I agree fully as CAB format is meant for Windows. IMHO it is problematic
to use it for Unix like systems.


> >> Is the file format smart enough to handle text files
> >> properly(i.e. convert line ends on extraction)?
> 
> > I'd say yes because CABARC.EXE seems to treat files as binary. 
> 
> Um, this means "no" as Thomas was asking about automatic translation

That's true. 


> of NL to CRNL or CR, and all that.  And the answer is that for CAB
> extractors the CAB file really contains a number of bytestreams, which
> are not interpreted or changed.  (Personally, I like that.)

Me too. :-)


Thomas's questions surely were valid and helpful. I was just kidding
confirming he shouldn't ask :-)



-- 
Manfred