Distributing Rev Stacks (was The age of user-translatable applications...

[Rob Cozens]

>  >On Macs .sit files are NOT acceptable, because .sits are version
>>specific: if the downloader has the wrong version of StuffIt, the
>>archive won't expand.
>
>That seems a little notional to me; people use StuffIt all the time. If
>you're concerned about version incompatibility, you could always use a
>stuffer application that's a few versions old; the free StuffIt Expander is
>fully backward-compatible so newer versions would still work with it.

It has not been so in my experience, Jeanne.

Aladen, in their infinite wisdom does not make all new versions of 
StuffIt backwards compatable; so a .sit created by an older version 
cannot always be expanded by newer versions, and of course ones 
created by a newer version cannot be expanded by an older version.

Frankly I was surprised to find it is the format used by MetaCard for 
Mac downloads (.zip & .exe for Win & .tar for Unix).  At the height 
of my consulting business, I probably never had more than a dozen 
active clients at any one time, and I was ALWAYS running into .sit 
incompatibilities.  It got to the point where I had to maintain 
several versions of StuffIt and remember which client had which. 
Finally I said , "This is b___ s___!  I'm going to distribute 
archives that will open on any Mac, regardless of what version of 
what software is or is not installed."

And I still feel this is the preferred approach.  Even if Stuffit's 
problems have been fixed since I last distributed .sits, that still 
means I'm telling the potential downloader "You will have to go 
somewhere else and get some other software to open and use my files 
if you don't have version x of program y installed on your computer."

>A self-extracting archive is not only much larger, it's something some
>people will be wary of because of the virus issue (since it's an
>application, it can carry a virus payload), and it's completely
>platform-specific.

I'm looking at a 492K .zip and a 532K .exe.  That's an 8% growth. On 
the Mac it's 496K .sit vs 520K .sea.  That's 5 % expansion.

Isn't an installer program an application that can carry a virus 
payload?  Do people shy away from clicking on "Install"?  A 
self-expanding archive is no more or less a threat, and it frees the 
user from the requirement of having a specific version of another 
application to manipulate the file they have downloaded.

And aren't .sit files platform-specific?  Is there a StuffIt for 
Windows?  Is .zip more universal than .sit?

Here's a novel thought: will native .rev files transfer successfully 
across platform and across the Internet without browser set-up on the 
part of the downloader?

And a final question to show my lack of web savvy: how do I script 
html to get an uploaded .txt file to download rather than being 
displayed in the browser window?  That's one of the reasons the 
uploaded files were BinHexed.
-- 

Rob Cozens
CCW, Serendipity Software Company
http://www.oenolog.com/who.htm

"And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three;
Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee."

from "The Triple Foole" by John Donne (1572-1631)