From: roelofs@pan.arc.nasa.gov (Cave Newt)
Subject: Re: Some minor problems with the new Info-ZIP
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 92 19:09:39 GMT

bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de writes:

>1) There is some inconsistency in the file naming in the two archives.
>The files in the unzip50.zip archive all have lowercase-only names,
>while the files in zip19p1.zip have mixed-case names. It seems that
>the two archives have been created by two different people. At first I
>even thought that the first archive has been re-packaged under
>MS-DOS... Would be nice if at least the text files that have one and
>the same contents in the two archives have also one and the same name.

Oh really?  That's true; could be; and it would be.  Which is to say:
the files in unzip50.zip did not have lowercase-only names when they
left *my* system.  We *are* talking about sources, right?  Anyway, yes,
Zip and UnZip are maintained by two different people; we're slowly
moving closer together in terms of making these a unified package, 
but it's hampered by the fact that UnZip is ancient history and has
a lot of cruft in it.  For all I know, the archive you found *was*
re-packaged under DOS.  Sorry, but that's not how it was released.

>2) The file names in the Mac and VMS directories do not conform to the
>ZipRules.

Oh, well, as everybody knows, "do as I say, not as I do". :-)  Which
is to say:  there are limits to what you can jam into an 8.3 format,
and it's not reasonable to do so with Mac and VMS filenames, since
they're not useful on 8.3 systems (i.e., MS-DOS), anyway.  I apologize
for the filename with two dots in it; that was an oversight (fatal in
the case of SHEZ80, btw).  To be fixed in the next release...

Btw, if you use UnZip to extract, none of this matters, since it does
a good job of mapping filenames for you.  And the next version will
have a -x option similar to Zip's (that is, you'll be able to exclude
the VMS and Mac files via "unzip unzip51 *.[ch] -x VMS* Mac*").

>3) The makefiles are also not consistent between the two archives. For
>instance, one of the makefiles supports the "list" tag, while the
>other doesn't.

I'll let Jean-loup handle that one. :-)

>4) What happened with the program ship? Why its disappearance is not
>properly documented?

Ship has nothing to do with zip and unzip, aside from being a convenient
way to mail zipfiles to and from the authors.  It was included as "extra
baggage" for two releases, but it was never fully documented (i.e., no
man page) and nobody ever claimed it would stick around.  The old version
still works; a new version will be distributed separately, "sometime soon"
(I'll let Mark make that more precise; he's been on vacation).

>A version that would support
>different encoding schemes (e.g., xxencode) would be nice...

Now *there's* an interesting idea.  That should be a fairly simple
extension to the format, too.  Mark, what do you think?

>5) The most important of all. Can I create archives that are
>compatible with PKZIP 1.10 or with the old zip? I.e., is there an
>option to disable the deflation method?

No.  Zip 1.0 (and now 1.1--just a couple of bugfixes) are still available; 
use them in the interim, but don't expect them to be updated any further.
I agree that it would be convenient to have the old compression methods
supported, but it adds a lot of complexity and bulk to the code.  Just the
sources for Zip and UnZip are now running well over a megabyte.

Greg Roelofs
Info-ZIP UnZip guy