README
1UnZip 5.4 for BeOS
2
3NOTE:
4
5If you want to build UnZip 5.4 or later from the source, you'll need to
6have the "xres" tool installed (unless you remove the "xres" lines in the
7beos/Makefile). This will cease to be a problem when BeOS R4 ships this
8fall. Until then, you can get xres from
9ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/experimental/tools/xres-102.zip.
10
11HISTORY
12
13UnZip 5.30 was the first official release of Info-ZIP's UnZip to support
14the filesystem in BeOS.
15
16UnZip 5.31 added support for the new filesystem that appeared in the
17Advanced Access Preview (aka DR9) Release of BeOS.
18
19UnZip 5.32 added several important bug fixes.
20
21UnZip 5.4:
22
23- supports BeOS on x86 hardware (and cross-compiling, if a compiler is
24 present)
25
26- ask the Registrar to assign a file type to files that don't have one
27
28- adds a new -J option on BeOS; this lets you extract the data for a file
29 without restoring its file attributes (handy if you stumble on really
30 old BeOS ZIP archives... from before BeOS Preview Release)
31
32- will restore attributes properly on symbolic links (you'll need
33 zip 2.21 or later to create ZIP files that store attributes for
34 symbolic links)
35
36*** WARNING ***
37You may find some extremely old BeOS zip archives that store their
38file attributes differently; these will be from DR8 and earlier (when
39BeOS copied the MacOS type/creator fields instead of using the current
40extremely flexible scheme).
41
42You can still unpack the _data_ in older zip files, but you won't be
43able to recover the file attributes in those archives. Use the -J option
44with these files or you'll get "compressed EA data missing" and "zipfile
45probably corrupt" errors, even though the data is intact!
46
47The new scheme makes handling BeOS file attributes much more robust, and
48allows for possible future expansion without another round of
49incompatibilities.
50
51That's life on the edge!
52*** WARNING ***
53
54The new filesystem allows for huge files (up to several terabytes!) with
55huge amounts of meta-data (up to several terabytes!). The existing ZIP
56format was designed when this much data on a personal computer was
57science fiction; as a result, it's quite possible that large amounts of file
58attributes (more than maybe 100+K bytes) could be truncated. Zip and UnZip
59try to deal with this in a fairly sensible way, working on the assumption
60that the data in the file is more important than the data in the file
61attributes.
62
63One way to run into this problem is to mount an HFS volume and zip
64some Mac files that have large resources attached to them. This
65happens more often than you'd expect; I've seen several 0-byte files that
66had over four megabytes of resources. Even more stupid, these resources
67were _data_ (sound for a game), and could have been easily stored as
68data...
69
70KNOWN BUGS
71
72None! Yahoo!
73
74Please report any bugs to Zip-Bugs@lists.wku.edu.
75
76- Chris Herborth (chrish@qnx.com)
77 November 2/1998
78