Conference hydra::amiga_v1

    Nice!  Better in all respects to vanilla AmigaDog as far as I have
    tried it.  Only problem I had is that the installation procedure fails
    if you don't already have ARP installed. 

    Near as I can tell,
	ARUN foo NOIO
    is pretty much of an equivalent for
	RUNBACK foo
    At least enough so to consider getting rid of RUNBACK.  Is this right,
    or is there a significant difference I have missed.  ARUN NOIO seems to
    be fine for running MACH.

	Paul

    
    I agree, I like ARP too.  Is there recent ARP programmer documentation
    online?  I don't think I'll find time myself, but it sure would
    be nice to have a shell that used arp.library...  This could probably
    drive the shell executable down in size considerably.  Any chance
    of such a revamp Steve (Drew)?
    
    - steve

    There are two more ARP files now on PLINK; I hope to get them on
    the e-net here by weekend.  I believe they are both programmer
    oriented.
    
    

    Am I missing something?  If I use the Drew Shell (which I have finally
    gotten used to and have grown to love), then what would be the point
    of switching over to ARP?  Would there be anything to gain?

    
    Not a whole lot, but if we had a simple shell which accessed
    the ARP Resident list, it wouldn't need to have all those
    DOS-like commands in it.  It would still provide the other functions
    of a shell (like Alias, Set, Command line editting, etc).
    This way the commands themselves are shared so you don't take
    such a large hit when you start up a new shell.  Maybe
    Conman is the way to go if you want to use Arp.
    
    - steve

    this is what I was just going to start a discussion on...oh well...
    
    another point is that some of the other programs (like DME) will
    use the arp library to do a fancy file requestor if it finds the
    library!...so I guess the answer is the programming side of things
    is the real gain...looking forward to getting the official rel2
    (version 1.1) programming stuff on-line....I've looked at the stuff
    that came on the transactor disk (I get both!) and it looks good!
    Well documented, and a lot of nice functions like resource tracking,
    etc.  so I'll keep both on-line for now....(Love that HARD Drive...;-)
    
    scott

    I just received the official ARP release disk from MicroSmiths in
    the mail.  This disk contaians the user docs and executable files
    that I've already posted.  It also contains a ton of developer info.
    
    I was thinking that I could upload the entire volume here rather
    than uploading a lot of little archives. 
    
    I can use either TRACKER or PACK-IT to archive the entire disk.
    Anyone have any preferences?
    
    Ed.

    I'd love to see this disk uploaded. I'd prefer pack-it over tracker
    and warp over either of the 2 suggested methods.

    I'll vote for putting it up the same way we do the fish stuff (if
    steve doesn't mind)...the reason is this...I like to be able to
    look at things, and extract and print files here on the vax BEFORE
    I DL the thing!...if its in ARC files, at least we can do it with
    cvtarc, and vms-arc....also it lets you get what you need...ie a
    single directory, etc.  no need to DL the stuff I already got!
    
    anyway, just a thought....anyway that works is better than not having
    it.
    
    I just might be tempted to look at hooking it into the shell!

                         scott
    

    	Re. -1
    
    		I vote for ARC too. It's very convenient to look at
    files in the VAX, print any documents and then transfer only those
    I need in Amy. 
    
    Miguel A. Alvarez

    OK; I guess there will be four or five seperate archives.  I'll
    get to it this weekend; watch this space.
    
    Ed.

    Well, isn't democracy wonderful!  Sorry, guys, but I went ahead
    and used WARP to upload the entire volume.  I did this for two
    reasons..
    
    1.  WARP is extremely wonderful. 
    
    2.  I am a lazy, worthless, slob.  There were many ARCS within ARCS 
        on the disk, and I didn't feel like uploading umpteen different files.  
        Besides, Modem Life Testing is Steve Peters' job.  (Hi Steve!)
    
    
    Soooo, the first thing you gotta do is retrieve WARP11.ARC from
    my directory.  WARP really is great, combining the best of ARC and
    TRACKER.  Each track is gulped and compressed one at a time, and
    the overall compression is supposed to be comparable to ARC's.  I'm
    not sure I believe that last one, since the WARP'ed volume was still
    602 KBytes long.  
    
    Once you are sure that you know how to use WARP, prepare for a long
    download.  It took 95 minutes to upload using XMODEM.  Look for
    the file called ARP.WRP.   For people with less than a few megabytes
    of RAM (you know who you are) you'll obviously want to download
    directly to a fresh floppy.  WARP will then accept any device (RAM,
    DF1:) to restore the original disk format.
    
    All the files are, as usual in LEDS3::USER6:[ACCIARDI.AMIGA].
    
    PS:  the ARP executables and users manual are still online in ARC
         format.  Unless you want the developer stuff, the files ARP11.ARC
         and ARPDOCS.ARC will do nicely to get you going.
    
    Ed.
    
    

Re: .12

>    ... there were many ARCS within ARCS on the disk ...

>    Each track is gulped and compressed one at a time, and
>    the overall compression is supposed to be comparable to ARC's.  I'm
>    not sure I believe that last one, since the WARP'ed volume was still
>    602 KBytes long.  

Don't give up on WARP yet.  You didn't do a fair test of its compression
abilities.

All data compression schemes exploit redundancies and regularities in the
uncompressed input data.  The compression algorithms remove the redundancies
in the input in order to produce the compressed output.

You can think of a compression algorithm as sucking the "fat" out of
the data.  After this process is done once, there is less "fat" left
in the data, and future attempts to remove it will less successful.

If this wasn't true, you could take a large file, run it though a
compression program enough times, and get a single bit as the output.

(Well, sometimes you CAN do what I stated in the above paragraph.  But in
that case Information Theory when states that the decompression instructions
will be at least as complex as a more reasonable encoding of the data!)

Anyway, the ARP distribution contains several ARC files.  Those files
are already compressed, and so you cannot expect to compress them
much further.

    Has anyone successfully downloaded and un-WARPED the ARP volume?
    
    Just curious...
    
    Ed.

    Ed,
    
    I downloaded WARP11 and ARP11.WRP yesterday and "unwarped" it ok.
     ARP (with some exceptions) is up on the system at work.  So...
    looks like it works ok.  It took very little time to rebuild the
    floppy and was quite painless.  Seemed faster than ARC.
    
    One point about the ARP library.  It DOES NOT handle directory names
    that have brackets (a legal character) in the name  i.e. [MY_DIR].
    
    The offending commands are PATH, ASSIGN, COPY and DELETE.  Since
    I use my own COPY, this was no problem, but did cause a bit of
    confusion at first.  Any way to feed this problem back to the 
    developers?
    
    John
    

    Any problems with ARP can be directed to Ken Salmon (ID Ken S) on
    PLINK.  I will most likely compile some complaints and send Ken
    a message.
    
    Another bug(?) reported is that the DIR command will not list files
    that are open.  

    
    One other problem I have with DME & ARP and I expect it is an ARP
    problem...
    
    When you use ARPLOAD in DME and bring up the file requestor if
    you select a directory with the mouse it does not append the /
    to the dir spec.  For example, I'm in VDO: I click on S in the
    ARP file requestor.  An S appears in the dir spec at the top of
    the requestor with no slash.  Now I click on the file "dialwork.script"
    and then "OK".  DME responds with file not found.  You may notice
    that the buffer is then named "VD0:Sdialwork.script".  No slash.
    The problem may lie in DME.  Come to think of it we could look
    at the ARP programmer docs to be sure, but I would guess that ARP
    is returning one string for the entire filename.  Hard to imagine
    how this got overlooked...

    - steve

    Does anybody have ARP online somewhere?  If not, anybody working
    in Tewksbury (TWO) have it?  [I'm in TWO so it would be more convient
    than mailing throught].  Does ARP come in source?  If not, can it
    be gotten?  Inquiring minds want to ...
    
    George
    

>    Does anybody have ARP online somewhere?  If not, anybody working

	WJG""::AMIGA:ARP11.ARC
		     ARP11.WRP
		     ARPDOCS.ARC