🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9105091909.AA19088@rice-chex> tower@prep.ai.mit.edu writes:
>All an archive site has to do to switch is to provide the source of
>the new compressor/decompressor uncompressed.  Perhaps is a variety of
>languages/implementations.   
>
>-len

Actually, all an archive site has to do, in order to provide decent
service for its users, some of whom may have licensed their OSes from
comanies who have signed licenses with Unisys (booooo!), is to modify
their ftpd.  Start, for example, with wuarchive's ftpd, which
automatically uncompresses a ".Z" file if the user asks for it.  All
you need to do then is to change this so that if the user asks for a
".Z" file, and only a ".Y" file exists, is to unyabba and compress the
file, and send the result.  YOu can probably go the other way, too.

However, {,un}yabba will never replace compress so long as the latter
compiles and runs without error on every popular machine and
architecture, with the optimizer on, and and the former does not.
[For example, yabba will not work for (some subset of the set of)
large binary files on our SGI 4D/340S.  Dan also spent so much effort
unrolling loops that the source is nearly incomprehensible, and breaks
a parallelizing preprocessor which can be used by the MIPS/SGI
compiler to great effect.]


-GAWollman
Garrett A. Wollman - wollman@emily.uvm.edu

Disclaimer:  I'm not even sure this represents *my* opinion, never
mind UVM's, EMBA's, EMBA-CF's, or indeed anyone else's.