archivers/ha 0.999b_2 DragonFly

HA is an archiver which I released in January 1993 as version 0.98. After that I had plans to improve speed, archive handling etc. which would have required total rewrite of the code. For that I unfortunately could not find time. Because there has been quite considerably interest for internals of HA (especially for the HSC compression method) I decided to make a source level release from my current test version (0.999 beta) and place it under GNU General Public License. The sources for this version are not very consistent or clean, but everything should work.

There are several improvements which should be made before this could be called version 1.0. Some of the most obvious of these are:

• Compression methods should be coded in assembler for PC and using more efficient data structures for 32 bit platforms. Current version does some things only to overcome 64kB segments of 8086.
• UNIX port has still some problems and is missing some things (for example a grouping operator in wildcard matches).
• File handling is far from optimum.
• Archive handling is not too clever either.
• Testing should be done more thoroughly as there are many special cases in compression routines which get used very rarely.
• Documentation of code and algorithms is totally missing.