Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 10:14:28 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: obrien@NUXI.com (David E. O'Brien) Cc: FreeBSD-Ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: blt2.1 Message-ID: <27899.847649668@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 10 Nov 1996 09:57:38 PST." <199611101757.JAA17414@relay.nuxi.com>
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> Do you have a plan for this now? Will it be Makefile var dependent or a > more incompassing method? This sounds neat! Far more encompassing. The only hold-up in actually starting this project up to now has been the fact that I don't have a reasonable library for handling ZIP files, which I've chosen as the next generation packaging scheme's file format. ZIP files give good random access to data with compression, and they're _standard_ which means that you can pick them apart and look them over, if you wish. A lot of people have made it very clear that I'd be hung from a flagpole if I went to some custom file format, ala Red Hat's RPMs, so I had to choose something fairly common. Out of ZIP, ZOO or ARC, I think ZIP is the best choice. In any case, it finally occurred to me (with a loud accompanying "duh!") last week that I don't have to make the lack of a ZIP access library such an impediment to progress, I can simply write the API to some hypothetical interface spec and then keep the "zip files" as actual directories with the entries as files. This will make it easy to monitor the "insides" of a package file during testing and also let work continue past the zip API problem until we have a chance to go back and implement that piece. In any case, this is a 3.0 project since I won't have a chance to do squat until we've gotten 2.2R and 2.1.6R off the ground. Jordan
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