StuffIt (and its relatives) have been a thorn in the side of Mac free
software providers nearly since a Mac first had a SCSI interface. The
self-extracting archives must have been invented so that commercial
software developers could distribute the code and/or updates in a form
that was easily downloadable without forcing their customers to buy
someone else's software. Alladin usually (but not always) has provided
an alternative decompress-only program, without the de-BINHEX part, so
you could to take the posting (or archive file), run it through EMACS
or something else that could take arbitrarily large files, and then run
it through their stripped down program, which, at times, would only
decompress in place. Basically, they made people's life sufficiently
difficult that those who didn't have strong principles against either
stealing software, or buying into the 'shareware' game, sent in their
checks. One of many reasons i stopped using the Mac for things that
it wasn't especially good at once LINUX came out.
I believe that there's a MacGZip (or something like that), but i'm not
sure it knows how to write Mac resource forks. I sure hope *something*
can be provided that avoids requiring one to get some StuffIt variant.
I don't mind of people distribute self-extracting archives, just don't
expect/force the users to have to deal with a commercial vendor.
-- Tovar (who remembers programming the 128K Mac)
