The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..

[sblakey at freei.com]

-----On Thu May 18 10:56:20 2000 Martijn Faassen wrote-----
>
>Grant Griffin <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote:
>> And, yes, I can even use WinZip.  (BTW, why to you Unix people
>> separate your packager gizmo from your compression gizmo?  Very
>> strange...)
>
>May be strange, but it allowed us to switch from .tar.Z files to 
>.tar.gz files and now perhaps slowly to .tar.bz2 files without having
>to do anything to 'tar'. And 'tar' has various other uses as well.
>So does compression; you can for instance compress the output of
>some program or other convoluted stuff. :)
> 
>unix-is-strange-but-true-ly yours,
>
>Martijn
>-- 
>History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
>No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?
>-- 
>http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>

Also, if you use GNU tar, the packager and compresser are not very
seperated.

For example, you can do tar -cfz package.tar.gz package to create a gzip
compressed archive of the "package" directory and tar -xzf
package.tar.gz to extract it.  I admit, I tend to get lazy and use the
suffix .tgz instead of the .tar.gz suffix when I work in this way.

You can also use the Z option to use the old unix compress program in
the same way, or even the I option to use bzip2 as a filter.

If you just want to use the archiver/compressor together as a single
unit, there is nothing stopping you.

The unix philosiphy may historically be "Do one thing and do it well",
but there is no need to stick with a pedantic definition of :one thing"
in your daily life.

What-was-the-original-topic?-ly y'rs
	-Sean Blakey