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Date:Mon Dec 27 12:00:02 2001 
Subject:Re: Thirty years of frustration (:-/)... 
From:Jonathan L Cunningham 
Volume-ID:1011227.01 

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001 21:41:08 +0000 (UTC),
pete@jwgibbs.cchem.Berkeley.EDU (Pete Goodeve) said:

>In article <3C21C7DF.6027@ed.ac.uk>,
>Stephen Isard  <S.IsardDeleteThis@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>Can I just get clear whether the problem is that there are Linux
>>distributions that lack bzip2 or whether it is that I was wrong in
>>assuming that just because it is there, people are familiar with it?
>>If it is the second, then perhaps Aaron could put a note by the link on
>>the web page to the effect that this file has been compressed with bzip2
>>(see man page).
>On our Linux installation it wasn't present.  I built the system myself,
>but I don't remember seeing it as an option.  I think I did notice an
>RPM for it on the RedHat site among the links I found on Google, but
>I simply downloaded the executable directly from the author's [I think]
>site.  I had no trouble once I got that.

I wanted to try it on two different systems - one based on RH6.2, but
only a partial installation (it didn't have X for example) and one
based on a very old version of ... um, I've forgotten. I'm telnetted
into the machine, how do I ask it what it is?

Anyway, neither had bzip2, and I'd never heard of it. But I'm not
a Linux expert.

A question arises, what level of Linux expertise are you assuming
for potential users of your reduced poplog?

>I don't think anything needs to be changed except to provide *some*
>information as to the compression used, and perhaps where to find the
>program if needed.

I agree with this - the fact that there were a couple of compression
programs which I _had_ heard of doesn't matter. A note saying "I've
used bzip2 because it provides better compression" is more than
enough explanation.

Jonathan

-- 
Jonathan L Cunningham