PakFiles & Portability

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Hi,

Some issues I encountered when writing the PakFile compiler:

(1) In the archive file format description I wrote that each "directory
entry" would have ctime, mtime (creation/modification time) stored with it,
but I'm not sure anymore whether this data is useful at all. What do you
think?

(2) (almost the same issue as above) Is support for (sym-) links useful?

(3) I wanted to store the archive creation time/date as "seconds since
1/1/1970" since that is the format I know from PCs. But the C time ()
function is only required to return "an arithmetic value representing the
time", so getting an appropriate value can be very cumbersome on some
systems. 
What about storing the date/time as ASCII string (like the output of 
'date -u') ?

(4) Should allowed file sizes and offsets in PakFiles be 32 or 64 bit?
64bit has the advantage of supporting files > 2GB, but implementing 64bit
values in C portably is a pain in the a**. 

Cu
	Christian

PS: If I ignore the nastiest protability issues for now, I'll propably have
a very first version of the PakFile compiler running until Saturday...
--

REALITY.SYS corrupted ... reboot Universe [Y,n]?