On Thursday 22 February 2001 10:28, Advertising wrote: > I believe the Stuffit self-expanding archive format works across the > majority of the MacOS spectrum. (much wider that DebianPPC) Is there a > reason not to use that file format for the Debian PowerMac install items?
Yes, the reason is that mac files aren't as simple as files on other operating sysems, they have two forks, the Data fork and the Resource fork. The Data fork is just like any other file, but if the resource fork isn't stored in the data fork somehow, things get screwed up very quickly, if you're transferring the files over a protocol that doesn't grok resource forks. Stuffit crams both forks into one file. If it were self extracting, it'd have to forks (or, SHOULD). A lot of browsers will automatically take care of .hqx though, which might be a good reason to use a binhex'd self extracting archive. (even though most everyone knows .bin is cooler) Benh also used to provide bootx in a netatalk format tarball, i don't know if he still does. I'm afraid the emphasis here should be compatability at the expense of all else.. if you have a bare system which has to have macos in order to boot linux, you're already in non-free land, it's a bad idea to make people go even further out of their way just to boot into linux. this is especially true of net installs, when a cd is just not an option for some unfortunate reason.
