"Eric Cabot" <ecec at midway.uchicago.edu> asked:
BTW, you mentioned a service that you run called netserv. I was
wondering...basically EMBL uses uuecoded .zoo's for it's stuff
while IUBIO has -correction- had stuff in all manner of formats
from zoo to arc to zip. Now that these sites are mirroring,
are they getting standardized in their data storage formats?
I assume you are a DOS person from this question: Mac sw is always
a BinHex'd file, either a Stuffit 1.5.1 archive or a self-extracting
Compactor. VMS stuff is ZOO'd; Unix is tar'd and compressed.
The PC stuff is by convention supposed to be Dumas-table uuencoded
self-extracting PAKs. This has not been possible in some cases,
especially where I didn't have the disk space to unpack and repack
some packages. So, at least on the UH server, *most* sw is self-
extracting PAKs, but some are ZIPs and ARCs if that is what the
author provided.
I agree the situation is not optimal, but (1) most of us can't justify
spending more time on the sw project (I'm the exception, now) and
(2) all necessary decoders/dearchivers are available from each server.
I expect this problem to *decrease* over the next few months.
dan davison
