Ideas for HPACK Extensions ========================== HPAKIDEA.TXT Updated 06 Jul 1991 "It's beautiful! It'll bring tears to your eyes!" The following ideas have been proposed as extensions for the basic HPACK archiver: - Have a device driver which makes an HPACK archive seem like a filesystem. - Have an HPACK daemon which works like a spooler daemon. Each person has in their $HOME a directory called .hpack. The daemon regularly checks this directory and adds/freshens any files it finds in it to some predetermined archive. Thus when working on a project it is possible to keep continuous backups of current work. This idea may be rendered somewhat obsolete by tools like SCCS. - A dead archive resurrector. Currently it is possible to resurrect archives which have been created with the -e option by hand. A program to do this automagically would be interesting, but probably not too useful: If the archive directory (which constitutes a very small portion of the total archive) has been zapped then chances are the data (which makes up the bulk of the archive) has been zapped as well. - An idea from Stu (the King of the Pipeline Stalls): Create a version of HPACK which compresses everything into memory and then executes an illegal instruction. This creates an HPACK archive called "core". This is very versatile, since all you need to do is load the file into adb (the program cavemen used to debug fire), patch it, and keep running it in extract mode. This makes it possible to extract HPACK archives without a copy of HPACK. (BTW this is the person who thinks the only useful command in UNIX is "dd").