OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

Back to discussions
Expand all | Collapse all

Re: [office] Link to info-zip

  • 1.  Re: [office] Link to info-zip

    Posted 05-22-2006 18:03 
     MHonArc v2.5.0b2 -->


















    office message
    







    [Date Prev]
 | [Thread Prev]
 | [Thread Next]
 | [Date Next]

--

[Date Index]
 | [Thread Index]
 | [List Home]
    


    







    Subject: Re: [office] Link to info-zip
    








    Ideally we would want to reference something
which was itself being maintained with a standards organization, or at
the very least something which was both stable and authoritative.

    The ftp.uu.net version is stable --
it is an archived version and isn't going away.  However, it isn't
very authoritative.  In fact, this document is prefaced with this
comment block:

    [Info-ZIP note, 970311:  this
file is based on PKWARE's appnote.txt of
     15 February 1996.  It has
been unofficially corrected and extended by
     Info-ZIP without explicit permission
by PKWARE.  Although Info-ZIP
     believes the information to be
accurate and complete, it is provided
     under a disclaimer similar to
the PKWARE disclaimer below, differing
     only in the substitution of "Info-ZIP"
for "PKWARE".  In other words,
     use this information at your
own risk, but we think it's correct.  As
     of PKZIPW 2.50, two new incompatibilities
have been introduced by PKWARE;
     they are noted below.  Note
that the NTFS "conflict" is currently not
     real; PKZIPW 2.50 actually tags
NTFS files as having come from a FAT
     file system, too.]

    On the other hand, the appnote at http://www.pkware.com/business_and_developers/developer/appnote/
is certainly authoritative.  But it is not stable.  The location
can change at any time, and PKWare can replace this 6.2.2 version with
a new version at any time.  Also, they do not seem to make available
on their web site the previous numbered versions for reference.

    So we don't have a really good choice
here.


    I was looking at this the Info-zip.org
site (http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/doc/).  They appear to have
archived old versions of the PkWare app note, and as a group, the Info-zip
members seem to be providing some sort of stewardship of the format.  However,
my copy of Winzip could not open their archives.  This proves the
point of a need for a single normative standard for Zip archives.  We're
not going to solve this problem now, but we might consider sending a note,
from the TC, to some of the Info-Zip and some of the main zip archive tools
companies and encourage them to get together and work on a definitive zip
standard that we (and others) can reference in future specifications.

    -Rob

    David Faure <faure@kde.org> wrote on 05/22/2006
11:41:40 AM:

    
> ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/archiving/zip/doc/appnote-970311-iz.zip
    
>
    
> --
    
> David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
    
> Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
    
    




    







    


    [Date Prev]
 | [Thread Prev]
 | [Thread Next]
 | [Date Next]

--

[Date Index]
 | [Thread Index]
 | [List Home]


Related Content