On 12/29/05, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> 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
