From your tape editors: In order to be able to distribute the SIG tapes using the tree mechanism, we view it as desirable to try to limit the size of the combined collection to one reel of tape at 6250 BPI. Since the amount of material submitted is too large to do this any other way, we have preferred to use data compression programs to compress the submissions in places, rather than having to remove items from the distribution arbitrarily. The tools used are furnished in the .tools subdirectory of the index directory for the tape collection (in the Spring '90 case, that would be [90AVAXLT.TOOLS]). To simplify extraction, a few conventions are adopted to specify how to decompress: file.ext_LZW Compressed with LZCOMP, decompress with LZDCMP file.ext_Z or file.ext-Z Decompress with COMPRESS -D (in the second case, rename to file.ext_z). Note that compress deletes the compressed input file if it succeeds, so copy if you want the original compressed file also. file.TAZ Decompress with COMPRESS -D as above after rename to file.tar_z; then use a tar format reader to pull the tar file apart. (Tarread23a will do nicely.) file.TAR_LZW Handle exactly as file.taz. These files have generally been produced on unix systems and the most compatible decompressor is Gnu COMPRESS here. file.ZOO Decompress with ZOO. Zoo will be used as the default compress/decompress utility because it allows decompression of selected items in a ZOO archive and directories of the archive without decompressing first. Note: ZOO files destined for VMS systems will be set to stream_lf here so VMS ZOO will decompose them properly. ZOO files for programs for other machines will generally be set to fixed 512 byte records for simpler file transfer. The FILE utility (on these tapes) can be used to convert these. Future Help: When submitting material, please avoid redundant files. Compress your libraries (especially with /DATA=REDUCE), omit listing or map files, compile without debug unless you MUST have DEBUG there for some reason. Don't bother submitting object files if macro source is supplied, or Runoff output where the input is supplied, as examples. Also, submit programs only when they've changed since you last submitted them. Repetition of old stuff does none of us much good. Versions of someone else's old stuff that you fixed and/or made less crufty are most welcome though. If you can supply ONE file named AAAREADME.TXT in the top level of the directory tree you use (others named something else) it will speed the tape creation process. Finally, PLEASE try not to use directory trees deeper than about 4 levels. Deeper trees cause errors during mastering (where some extra levels are introduced to keep submissions straight as a step in mastering) and can make reproduction of the final tape harder. If you can exclude extra directory levels from your submission, this will be helpful. Thank you. Glenn C. Everhart VAX SIG tapecopy coordinator Note: The file DECOMPRESS_ALL.COM is a template which can be used (after edit please) to decompress the saved material on the distribution. It is located in this directory.