From GAP-Forum-Sender@dcs.st-and.ac.uk Tue Mar 21 06:14:12 2000
From: Steve Linton <sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk>
To: Multiple recipients of list <GAP-Forum@dcs.st-and.ac.uk>
Subject: Archiving programs and the GAP distribution

Dear GAP Forum,

Steve Linton answered:

(.....)
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.

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 ...

Paulo Ney