Re: [boost] Unzipping the Boost distro

From: Daryle Walker (darylew_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-12-20 19:26:43

On 12/13/04 10:16 AM, "David Abrahams" <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> I just downloaded boost-1.32.0 and started to unzip it with the built-in
> facilities in Windows XP; the OS reported it was going to take 50
> minutes and it was *crawling*.  Using cygwin's unzip tool it was done in
> under a minute.

Maybe a bug report needs to go to MS.

> I'm thinking we should stop distributing raw .zip files  without an
> extractor...

Which would make it useless to anyone not on a Windows machine.  (And don¹t
say "use the *.tar.gz or *.tar.bz2 versions," because I could've countered
with the same advice.)

I dislike the idea of executable-wrapped archives in general.  You only have
a creator's word that the file isn't actually a Trojan and/or infected with
a virus.  (Even a trustworthy creator may get overridden by a cracker's
altered archives.)  Those archives are useless to people on other platforms,
unless the extractor's developer took extra time to add code to decode the
first platform's executable formats.

This is late, and it seems that you guys agreed to an extractor-included
version as an addition instead of a replacement.  Maybe we should add a list
of MD-5, or other checksum, values for each of our archives.

-- 
Daryle Walker
Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie
darylew AT hotmail DOT com