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@xxxxxxxxx
