Re: XAF

[James Troup <J.J.Troup@comp.brad.ac.uk>]

Peter Ross <eonicman@erols.com> writes:

> > > Check out this link to find out more information on a new
> > > Archive format that does away with the size limitations of Zip
> > > and the other formats.
> > 
> > What's wrong with gzip..?
>
> It's more advanced and universal.

An archive format with a still-in-flux draft specification (and with
little or no software that supports it) is more universal than tar,
cpio or zip?  Uhh, no.

As to advanced, I don't see anything wonderful about XAF myself.  The
author of the page seems to consider current archive formats' most
glaring "shortcoming" that they don't support files which are > 2Gb's?
Weeww.  Who cares?  Ext2 doesn't currently support files > 2Gb, I
doubt Minix does either.

I suspect there are better things to be ported.

P.S.

Your comment comparing XAF to PNG is highly misleading, PNG is
massively better than GIF, and is free.  XAF is not massively better,
afaics than other archive formats and tar, cpio, {g,}zip are already
free.  Oh yeah, and the PNG specification is released, stable and a
RFC, not some in-flux draft (with no apparent software support).

-- 
James
++ http://thor.lib.chalmers.se/~jamest/ ++