The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..

[Tamer Fahmy]

Thomas Wouters wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 10:30:58PM +0100, Grant Griffin wrote:
> 
> > BTW, why to you Unix people separate your packager gizmo from your
> > compression gizmo?  Very strange...
> 
> Strange ? Really ? I find it strange you would want to put different
> functionality into one program... Packing and compressing are two different
> things, so why force one program to do both ? :)
> 
> So much better to seperate the functionality: If you get a new version of
> the compress utility, or a new compress utility that does it so much better,
> you wont have to change anything in the packing utility. And the other way
> 'round. And decent packaging utilities provide support to magically include
> compression, by calling the appropriate compress utility itself... GNU tar
> has support for standard unix compress (.Z), gnu zip (.gz) and bzip2 (.bz2)
> this way, and you can tell it to start any program you wish, with the
> '--use-compress=' option.
> 
> Just like there isn't a Wordperfect or Word-alike program on (traditional)
> UNIX; no all-encompassing Word-processor. Instead, you edit using your own
> favorite editor, passing it through your own favorite text formatter, to
> translate it to a file format of your choosing. And just like Mosaic, long
> ago, didn't provide support for all protocols itself, but rather let other
> programs take care of them... You can see a lot has changed in the UNIX
> world, in this regard :-)

Not only that. Because it seperates them - it compresses them much better.
Why? 
Because the tar utility packages all the files in to a single file and runs 
the desired compression algorithm over it instead of just zipping every 
single file and putting it compressed into the archive...

Never-be-rude-to-an-arab-and-especially-not-to-a-Linux-user'ly y'rs,
  Tamer.

--
  -////-   | Tamer FAHMY, cs student at the univ. of technology Vienna
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