OpenEuphoria

Special archive format

• Posted by budmeister1 at JUNO.COM Apr 23, 2000
• 487 views

Hi everyone,

Last night I was laying in bed dreaming about MySQL and
ODBC when an idea popped into my head. It was a little
bit of RPM, a little of Zip, and very cool. It was...
a special archive format :)

</dramatics>

Seriously, I've been thinking about all the neat things
the Linux community is doing with the RedHat Package Manager
archive format - why couldn't we have something similar to that?

Think of all the possible applications: web-enabled databases
of Euphoria file archives, dependency management (library-wise),
automated install/removal, descriptive information about the
archive, and what it requires (platform, Eu version, etc).
The possibilities are endless.

Right now I'm thinking of 3 possibilities format-wise:

  1. wrapper for normal zipfiles - the EuArchiver extracts
     the zipfile and unzips it during install. this could be
     a problem for people that don't have the archiver, but
     it's great because you can store different archive formats
     inside - tar, zip, whatever.

  2. the spec file is a file inside a normal zip archive and
     the EuArchiver finds it and extracts information. Unzipping
     can be done with pkzip for Winzip like normal, and won't
     require a special archiver.

  3. a new format based off of RPM with its own packing scheme.
     the compression could be implemented in a normal Euphoria
     library instead of relying on external programs (pkzip).
     the downside is everyone will have to have the archiver in
     order to use the files.


I'm interested in everyone's opinions on this, especially which
scheme to use, and how popular it would be.


----->Buddy
budmeister1 at juno.com
http://tenbux.iwarp.com/