Mailing Lists: Apple Mailing Lists
Image of Mac OS face in stamp
 
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [OT] Standard OS X Compression format

On Thursday, November 15, 2001, at 05:51 PM, Steve Gehrman wrote:

I think the Macintosh community would be better off if we could phase out the .sit format and standardize on something that's open for Mac OS X.

What should the new format be? .gz and .tar.gz don't include resource forks.

Should we create a new format?

I think this is an important topic to finalize while OS X is still relatively new. Something as basic as file compression/decompression should not be in controlled by a single third party developer.

I can provide the open source application for compress and decompress once we decide.

MacBinary, BinHex, and Stuffit have been the staples of Macintosh file sharing for many, many years. Heck, I even have some MacBinary code lying around that I could whip up to use gzip for compression. The BIG problem, is that in order for your new, wonderful encoding scheme to be of any worth, it has to find it's way into MILLIONS of Mac users' homes. Stuffit, for those who are coming from non-Mac backgrounds, started as (I believe) a high schooler's pet project and has morphed into the de-facto encoding/decoding standard. Aladdin has done a great service by providing a clean, fast, and free decoder for almost any type of file encoding you're likely to find. As such, I would suggest that, instead of furthering the proliferation of file formats, use .sit if you are so inclined and use a combination of MacBinary and gzip (which Stuffit Expander will decode for you) if you want an open, accessible standard.

Brendan Younger

References: 
 >Standard OS X Compression format (From: Steve Gehrman <email@hidden>)



Visit the Apple Store online or at retail locations.
1-800-MY-APPLE

Contact Apple | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.