paul marwick,

13-Sep-99 00:21:32, paul marwick wrote to Jack Stein
 pm> Replying to a message of Jack Stein to Paul Marwick:
          Subject: File Managers

 JS>> Too bad, I would rather see self extracting apps banned,

Or at least not abused, as it is 99.99% of the time now.

 pm> There are a number of quite legitimate uses for self-extracting
 pm> archives. The only problem is that you need to be able to trust
 pm> the source. It should require little thought to see why companies
 pm> like IBM (who are only one of many who distribute things in
 pm> self-extracting archives) do so.

Humm.. I wish they were trust worthy.  But...

 pm> It means that they can distrubte code in a compreessed bundle _without_
 pm> having to worry about whether the end-user has the necessary extractor,
 pm> can obtain it if they don't already have it, or knows how to use it.

That part is totally wrong.  Especially for OEMs like Adaptec that has
employees who are so dumb that they use a WinXX self-extracting file to pack
native OS/2 drivers.

Thank god for Info-Zip UnZip, which works on some of those screwy EXE files.

Otherwise the abuse of use of the wrong archiver, not only does cause the very
problem you said they don't have to worry about, but could also cause the user
to have to buy and install another OS just to get at the files.

There is no size benefit and some size loss in using a self-extracting.

DOS and ZIP were very well established standards before self-extracting
archives existed.  So along came RAR and gained 3% on the average over ZIP.
But completely overlooked the platform incompatibility between WinXX and OS/2.
Then add in the self-extracting and you lose more than the 3% gained by RAR.
Forget the DOS standard and you lose compatibility.  Net result is APITA.
We would have been much better off to have stayed with ZIP which is still the
most commonly used standard on all PC platforms and makes a smaller archive
than the self-extracting incompatible crap we have to put up with now.

IMO self-extracting does have a very few valid uses.  And in a few cases RAR
can actually save more than 3%.  But all too often it causes more problems
than it solves.

And with the more common use of M$, this problem will get much worse before it
gets any better.  It isn't the dumb users that are the problem; it is the dumb
OEM employees who only know how to use M$ and don't know when NOT to use M$.

     Thanks and Good Luck,        Andy Roberts
                                  andy@shentel.net
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