Murray Lesser wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 ML> (Excerpts from a message dated 10-16-99, Roy J. Tellason to
 ML> Bat Lang) 

 ML> Hi Roy--

 BL> Recently down the filebone came a new version of UniMaint. 
 BL> Unfortunately, it was distributed as a  selfex archive. 
 BL> Since it is 2.4Mb+, and has very skimpy text material in the 
 BL> archive, there is no way to determine what I want to know, 
 BL> short of installing it 

RT>I just *hate* it when they do that...

 ML>     Why?  It saves a lot of trouble for those who haven't 
 ML> learned to keep an Unzip utility at hand, and doesn't do any 
 ML> harm that I can understand.

I'm not talking about just making stuff self-extracting,  that's a fairly
small price to pay in most instances,  and the addition disk space required
isn't all that much.

I was referring more to the ones that don't put sufficient _text_ in an
archive so that you can read about the silly thing before you have to end up
installing it in order to figure out whether you want to bother installing it
or not...

 ML> Its only drawback that I can see is that you cannot see what is 
 ML> in the file unless you execute it.  Of course, not even this is 
 ML> a drawback if you make it a practice never to download an 
 ML> application that you don't know what it does.  At least, the 
 ML> likelihood of an OS/2 virus being transmitted this way is 
 ML> exceedingly small.

Viruses are not of major concern to me here.

And as for downloads,  sometimes things look interesting,  and then I forget
what it was until I stumble across it at some later time.  Or I may only get
parts of something and not the rest because I've gotten too tired to finish
it,  or ran out of room on that drive,  or whatever.

---