MC IDE 2.6 - next steps

[Richard Gaskin]

Hello Chipp --

Good to see you dive into using the MC IDE.  Welcome aboard.

Chipp Walters wrote:

> Perhaps a better question is:
> 
> Are there any other tools which can uncompress .sit files? And are they 
> easy to use?

On my Win box I just double-click the .sit archive and Stuffit Expander 
launches, decompresses, and quits.

What difficulties are you experiencing?


> Or, can one just .gz the whole thing? (I imagine gzip doesn't retain 
> resources either..)

AFAIK gzip is a single-file format; we'd need to TAR it but that's not 
something I'd care to write, and I don't believe TAR normally handles 
Mac metadata ("Finder info", the type and creator codes).

If necessary, there is a simpler option than TAR (see below).

> btw, what's so important about the resource fork for Rev stacks? Can't 
> you just open and save and you've created a resource fork?

Resource forks aren't the issue here.  After earlier releases there were 
requests by some of the folks on this list to preserve the Mac metadata 
for the files.

Historically there were different distributions for each platform, each 
using the predominant compression method on the target OS (sit for Mac, 
zip for Win, and gzip for UNIX).  But today, without the engines 
included, making multiple distros seems like overkill.

If there is a preference among a majority of the folks here to abandon 
Stuffit in favor of something else, in the absence of an alternative 
that's mindful of Mac metadata the next best choice might be to simply 
compress the files into custom props in a stack file that acts as an 
installer, writing out with Mac metadata on that platform.

If a majority of folks here would prefer using a stack file "installer" 
I could make time to build it next week.  But before we go to the 
trouble let's assess the scope of the problem first, as there are plenty 
of tasks in this volunteer project to keep me busy as it is, and my I 
generalized tool for making stack-based installers conveniently isn't 
done yet and I've a few things to do before then (dropping the folder on 
Drop Stuff has been a convenient time-saver for me).

How many of you folks have found Stuffit files problematic to work with?

Would you prefer a stack-based "installer", and are there downsides to 
that approach?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com