🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan27.170859.11489@steggie.mtview.ca.us>
eric@steggie.mtview.ca.us writes:

>The source of FTP is generally available.   Why not modify FTP do all
>the compressing/uncompressing on the users behalf.  Any worthwhile
>compression scheme could be used (zip, gzip, perhaps even a command
>line version of squash, if it exists)  

Yet Another Standard (YAS)?  But your point is rendered
moot, I think, by the next factoid:

>A person submitting a file would just ftp it to an archive sight and
>ftp would pipe the file through some compression algorithm and onto
>the disk.  Likewise when one extracts a file from the archive the
>file is decompressed (if it was compressed in the first place) and 
>given to the user. 

One of the advantages of compression is that it saves
connect time, which is something many people have to pay for
in hard currency.  In many cases it also saves bandwidth.
For small files, these savings are not very significant,
probably, but for big transfers (large files or whole
directories) the savings can be pretty impressive.

>This way the people submitting and the people retrieving data need 
>never concern themselves with how the data is stored just that it's 
>accessible.

You've forgotten the Golden Rule: those with the gold make
the rules.  :-)

-- 
[Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin]
[Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson]
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