Could we use something better than zip for the dmd package?

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Thu Dec 22 22:27:01 PST 2011


On 12/22/2011 9:53 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 23 December 2011 at 05:18:30 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Not that easy, because will you really have the right platform 30 years from now?
>
> Enthusiasts have created portable open-source software emulators for many old
> platforms. Hell, you can boot Linux[1] (and UNIX V6 on a PDP-11, for the other
> side of the spectrum[2]) in your web browser these days!
>
> I would say that today's hardware architectures (and those from the past two
> decades) have acquired enough mass that they'll be accessible for the
> foreseeable future (our lifespans), mainly thanks to open-source emulators. The
> main problem is with copyrighted software: you can't buy a new copy of Windows
> 95, but you can't download it legally either.

That's why I mentioned Outlook Express.

I used to use a wave editor. My disk crashed, and I reformatted and reinstalled 
Windows. I installed the wave editor, but had lost the password to unlock it. 
The company that made it had gone bust.

I eventually did find the password, but I was s.o.l. with its data files without it.



> Indeed, proprietary file formats are the bane of archival. It doesn't seem to
> stop other software from importing data from them, though. Didn't Thunderbird
> have a feature to import data from Outlook Express?

Yup. Would you know that 30 years from now?


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