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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The ftp.uu.net version is stable -- it is an archived version and isn't going away.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).


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