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- 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").
-