[OpenAFS] Compressed source code...

[Russ Allbery]

Rodney M Dyer <rmdyer@uncc.edu> writes:

> Ok ok, I've observed that it was an oversite, and have already
> downloaded the TAR file itself.  WinZIP can deal with TARs directly,
> even though they aren't compressed.  I'm not really interested in having
> every compression tool under the sun (Microsystems? ... pun) installed.

The only really relevant compression mechanisms these days are gzip,
bzip2, and zip, plus tar and *maybe* cpio as archive formats.  There are a
bunch more obscure ones, but none of them are really relevant to
day-to-day life on the Internet.

> I'm also willing to accept that there's something misconfigured on my
> machine(s) relating to the MIME types that prevent IE from saving a
> "...tar.gz", or "...tar.bz2".  I'll just keep renaming it once it gets
> saved.

I don't think it's your machine -- I've seen this problem many times
before.  It's a more fundamental problem with IE.  Renaming files to
append the right file extension to match a MIME type isn't necessarily a
bad idea given the Windows type infrastructure, but it's the wrong thing
to do in the presence of a compression layer.  IE appears to ignore the
compression information for compression layers that it doesn't know how to
undo natively, and appears not to understand existing multi-level
extensions.  Both of these would be easy enough to fix, and it's annoying
that IE still hasn't fixed them (I've been seeing this problem with IE for
about five years, if I remember correctly).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>