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.
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
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?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com