Dear GAP Forum,

> >Another alternative that has been suggested to us is zip format which, we are
> >assured can handle text and binary nicely, and is now reliably available for
> >UNIX, Windows and MacOS, however it doesn't seem to offer enough advantage over
> >our present arrangements to justify the effort of changing at the moment.
>
>There is one real advantage that is being overlooked here. The ZIP distribution
>does NOT require the two-step process, since everyone has a Zip-like program in
>their machine - it is the most downloaded program in the world right now, according
>to download.com.
>
One could easily create a windows-based version of unzoo - maybe
someone could offer this an a coursework for a programming class ?

Then is can be used as an application to handle *.zoo files, just
as WinZip does when *.zip, *.tgz, etc. files are handled on Win32.

> >We would like to be able to offer source and binary distributions packaged for
> >the popular Linux package formats (Red Hat and Debian mainly) but so far we
> >have not been able to find the manpower to prepare these.
> >(....)
> > Steve
>
>That would be a really nice investment ...
>
Given the plethora of different versions of RedHat and Debian
that are presently being used, and the fact that Debian has
two different package managing systems right now,
I'd rather say that this would be a waste of resources.

Classical Unix way of handling these things (configure/make/make
install) is infinitely more flexible.

Dima
http://www.cs.uu.nl/staff/dima.html