On 12/29/05, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 12:54, Matt Morgan wrote:
> Museums and Libraries are as pedantic about standards as anyone.
> They're trying to think on scales of hundreds of years. In one hundred
> years, when we no longer have pax, star, or gnutar, it'll be easier to
> re-engineer starting from documented standards than to reverse
> engineer a non-standard.
If you have a C compiler and the gnutar source, you don't have
to reverse-engineer anything to make a program that uses it's
format. And by having the actual source you get the exact
specification, not what someone mistakenly thought it was
when they read the document a hundred years ago.
The really important part of this argument, to a professional
archivist, is the part where you say "if you have." No archivist would
build a repository around the expectation that C compilers and gnutar
source will be usable and readable in 100 years.
> I realize that in reality it's not this simple and that
> POSIX-compliance is not some be-all, end-all. Your point is really
> important--but ideally I should be able to get both
> standards-compliance and popularity, so I can work with the present
> and the future. Is there some archive format that gives me both?
I'd probably write ISO9660 CD's but you'll lose any OS-specific
attributes in the process. If you expect it to be read by
some currently-unknown OS, I guess that wouldn't matter and
I guess it depends on what you mean. For present needs I do need to
preserve file ownership and permissions.
might be a good thing. The more important issue is the format
of the data files. Is this something that you'd expect some
random computer to be able to use?
It would be nice if someone can open it in WinZip, but it's not
super-critical. I like that the Gnome archive manager seems to be able
to open tar, gnutar, ustar, etc. But again, not critical.
I didn't intend to make this super-complicated. I think the short
answer to my question is "no": I can pick a standards-based archive
format or I can pick a convenient and well-supported one. That's OK.
Thanks a lot,
Matt