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it is an archived version and isn't going away.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 <> wrote on 05/22/2006
11:41:40 AM:

> ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/archiving/zip/doc/appnote-970311-iz.zip

> 

> -- 

> David Faure, , sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,

> Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).