An outline proposal

[Dave Pawson]

On 13 October 2010 20:04, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamilton at acm.org> wrote:
> Your first proposal condition was
> "1. Provide a compressed archive format for general use."
> and I was disagreeing with that.
>
> I believe we want a package format for documents, and the intention is to use Zip as the basis.  I trust we will resolve that quickly, because the moment Zip is not the basis I can spend my efforts elsewhere.

I guess we're arguing over terms here Dennis? I used that phrase as
summing up what zip is all about,
but until we get a legal eagle view on whether ISO can call up one of
the zip formats I was reluctant
to use it.
 I'm not prepared to even mention zip until such time?

Your 'package format for documents' seems more constraining to me. I
can zip images, programs
anything else, not necessarily documents. Hence my reluctance.


>
> When I mean fundamental Zip I mean a constrained subset of PKWare Zip format that works as a packaging form with high portability and is not required to deal with the issues of transporting of archived materials (like TAR, TGZ, PAX [all Unix acronyms for archive formats], and the general Zip archive format).

Same arguments as above.  If xxx technology meets our requirements
then great. I'm not going
to put pkware (or any other) name in the requirement.
Whats all this with 'transporting archived material'? Meaningless phrase
to me and nothing to do with this work as far as I can see? What are
you transporting where, and how?



>
> I expect that a Zip/D would be such a limited profile defined as a free-standing specification.
>
> I don't expect legal issues at that level and don't see any reason to consider alternatives because of legal issues unless there are any.
Gloss definition of Zip/D please, or is it basically the wanted output
of this group?


>
> Microsoft OPC is specified in ISO/IEC IS 29500-2:2006 and the last time I checked, it is an ISO Standard.


29500 is. You list out how we can lift an unencumbered spec for a
compressed archive from that
and I'll be listening.


>
> I use Zip/D, Zip/D0, ..., Zip/D2 as conceptual placeholders for the kind of thing I suspect we are after here and what I would like to encourage, at least through Zip/D1, or Zip/D+XML or whatever we'd call it.

It would be nice if you explained terms before using them Dennis. We
might stand a chance
of keeping up with you then?

regards


-- 
Dave Pawson
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