Date: Fri, 5 May 1995 11:44:50 +0300
From: eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il (Eli Zaretskii)
To: kagel AT ts1 DOT bloomberg DOT com, leisner AT sdsp DOT mc DOT xerox DOT com
Subject: Re: When would V2 be shipped ?
Cc: mmcmpope AT inet DOT uni-c DOT dk, djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu

>	1) automatic ascii file conversion (a good guesser of "what's ascii and
>	what's not" (i.e. end of line)
>	2) if you run dos, you can leave the compressed files around...
>	On unix you can pipe, but you can't on dos...

Don't want to start compressing wars here, but just FYI: the same can be
achieved with .taz files.  ASCII conversion is done by the old DJGPP port
of GNU tar (and it can even be used to read files without uncompressing
the archive, with the -O switch).  You can also leave the compressed file
around, and unzip only the required file(s) when they are required, like
this:

	gunzip -c | tar xvf - /dir/subdir/file

For non-US residents, there is also a version of tar by a Russian author
which does .gz uncompression on the fly, without first converting to .tar.

That said, I also think the officially distributed files should be
compressed as .zip, so that DOS users won't have to learn yet another
Unix program with yet another set of obscure options.  Alpha and beta
releases are another matter.