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 <[e-mail]>; Mon, 26 Jul 1993 10:23:49 EDT
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 10:23:48 -0400 (EDT)
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Organization: University of North Carolina at Asheville
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From: "Joseph E. Van_Riper III" <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Xpk modules, and minor request


Salve, amici!

The following uuencoded blather is meant to be unpacked in your emodules:
directory.  It contains xpkmaster.m and library/xpk.m, two files that may
make packing stuff a little easier for you.

For those of you not familiar with the xpk standard, it's meant to help
programmers incorporate packing routines in their programs in such a way
that they don't have to mess with the actual compression method.  The xpk
system also helps the programmer incorporate newer packing methods (as
they are created) without compromising their older packing methods.  Of
course, the system also helps unpack compressed stuff <grin>.

You can get more information about the xpk standard (and all kinds of
nifty archive methods, not to mention the documentation for writing your
own programs using the xpk standard) in any of the aminet sites in
util/pack.  I think one of the files is xpkusr(something), while the other
is xpkdev(something).  The 'usr' one holds several different compression
libraries and some utilities.  The 'dev' one holds the information you'll
be interested in as a programmer.

I'm not 100% sure the xpkmaster.m module is exactly the way it should be.
Running Showmodule through it, it came up the way I expected, but I should
warn you that I did NOT use the standard 'p2m' program to create the
module, as I don't have c include files, and I didn't feel like using
harddrive space on maintaining C include files when I very much prefer
working in E.

In any event, I'm pretty sure the xpkmaster.m module will work as
expected.  I simply examined the pragmas and wrote the binary module file
by hand using a sector editor.  I figured out Wouter's system for handling
that kind of module work by comparing Showmodule's output of a module to
that module's hex values.. pretty simple, really.  But, there's always the
chance that I screwed up somehow, so I thought I'd point this out.

The libraries/xpk.m module was created in a normal way, though, so there
should be no problems with it.

If you require the other xpk libraries converted (there are, I think, two
more files that probably should be made into modules), well.. I guess
you'll have to handle it yourself (I didn't need them, so I didn't bother
to convert them <chuckle>).  In time, if nobody else bothers to do it,
I'll wind up doing it myself, just for the sake of completeness.  But for
now, I thought I'd make these available.  If you DO decide to make the
other two files, I'd like to have them (to avoid duplicated effort)..
please send them to my e-mail address.  I intend to send these efforts to
Dominik Mueller for inclusion in future releases of the Xpk standard.
I'll also archive all of them and throw them into an FTP site we all love
somewhere.

I'd like to request, however, that someone write a program to convert a
fairly standard text file to a binary module file for use by E.  The
current method of needing C or ASM include files to do something that
could easily be handled by examining the source code and re-writing it
to another program's syntax is inelegant, in my humble opinion.  In any
event, it slowed me down <grin>.

That is to say, it'd be nice to have a program to take a text file that
had such syntax as:

LIBRARY libname.library libnamebase
PROC LibSuperFunction1(A1,D0)
PROC Dum()
PROC LibDestroyAllLife(A3,D1)

and

DEF BOOGERBRAIN $8000aaaa0f
ENUM GEORGEBRAIN $8000aaaa10
 DANNYBRAIN
 FULUBRAIN
 GOREBRAIN
ENDENUM
OBJECT obname
 LONG boo
 LONG hiss
 BYTE arf 10 /* to denote 10 byte structure within obname */
ENDOBJ
SET GEORGEERR
 DANNYERR
 FULUERR
 GOREERR
ENDSET

and so on, and convert it into binary .m files that E could use.  I've
found that most of these include files are not that difficult to
understand, and could be re-written as some other 'standard' that could be
converted to a binary.

In any event, if and when I FINALLY finish my own program, and I have
enough time to work on this, I might consider trying to create such a
utility.. but I really don't anticipate having the time to handle it.  If
someone else out there is willing to work on such a project, there is at
least one user out here who would be grateful.

begin 644 xpkemods.lha
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``
end
size 1618