PKARC

John P. Nelson jpn at teddy.UUCP
Fri Feb 26 06:24:47 AEST 1988


>If you are using PKARC, you might give some serious
>consideration to going back to the Standard ARC.

I would NEVER go back to ARC.  I applied the "official" patch to
PKARC35, which turned off "Squashing" by default.  Therefore my
copy of pkarc is 100% compatible with ARC 5.21.

Why would I bother?  Because PKARC is 10 TIMES FASTER than arc.
I don't know about anyone else, but that means a LOT to me!

>PKARC is in violation of S E A's copywrite.

This would be AWFULLY hard to prove.  I believe that pkarc is a
complete rewrite.  It's not a look-and-feel issue either.  The
only thing in common between the two programs is the compression
algorithm (Lempel-Ziv), and that is public domain!

>The *occasional*  1-3% savings in compression is hardly
>worth the problems caused by incompability.

I agree.  But with the official patch from PK which turns off
the new compression mode (unless you use the right options),
it blows the pants off ARC from SEA.

---
John P. Nelson
   decvax!genrad!teddy!jpn
   mit-eddie!genrad!teddy!jpn
   ARPA!talcott.harvard.edu!panda!jpn



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