[NTLK] .sit files in unna

[Morgan Aldridge]

On Saturday, February 27, 2016, Marisa Giancarla <fstltna at me.com> wrote:

> I noticed some of the files in the unna archive are in .sit files. These
> are hard to work with nowadays and there is no free extractor on linux &
> pc's. What would people think about converting them to .zip or .7zip? .7zip
> has better compression but regular zip is natively supported on every
> platform. I would also be willing to rename the .pkg files to .newtonpkg to
> work better on OSX.


 While there are still a lot of .sit files kicking around, I find it best
to preserve them as Macs running System 7.x - MacOS 9.x are still probably
the most common computer used to bootstrap NewtonOS devices. They're also
still the best Newton OS development platform, although Paul, Matthias,
Eckhart, et al have made great strides on other OSes. .sit files preserve
important resource forks in files when used under MacOS.

That said, many Newton developers provided both .sit & .zip archives of
their software and I try to include both on UNNA, where available. In all
cases, I try to provide an uncompressed .pkg files along with them (though
there are likely a lot of older directories that I haven't gone back to and
updated). Let's face it, Newton .pkg files are not particularly large by
today's standards, so this the easiest solution for all platforms, incl.
the Newton which can download directly from the UNNA.org archives.

I wouldn't suggest .7zip as it's not as readily supported and, again,
better compression really isn't necessary.

I personally don't find .newtonpkg to be worth storing on the server as
it's only used for NCX on OS X and most packages that aNewton  user is
going to obtain are going to be named .pkg anyway, so they'll generally
just have to rename them. Not all OS X Newton-related software uses that
extension (and not across all versions of OS X), for example, Einstein
doesn't use it. I personally use NCX and don't find it difficult to rename
.pkg files before installing.

I suggest preserving .pkg, .sit, and .zip copies for the best
compatibility, otherwise just .pkg.

Hope that all makes sense and helps,



-- 
Morgan
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