From: Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@...>
Date: 2003-10-27T23:28:17+09:00
Subject: How to include zip in a program.

Hello all,

Yay! I'm now subscribed to this list. =)

As I mentioned earlier, I'm working on a program to gather data from 
OpenOffice.org files.  It's comming along well.  It is sort of a grep-like 
program.  One difference is that it can not only match text content, but 
it can match styles.

I think this is very neat.  You can take advantage of the logical 
structure of OpenOffice.org documents.  Say you have a document full of 
poems, and you create a style called "PoemAuthor".  With this program you 
can extract all the authors from the document.

Now, I am fiding one significant stumbling block: Zip.

OOo files are zip archives.  Ruby doesn't come with zip functionality by 
default, and I don't want to ask people to compile anything to get this 
program to run.  Most of them won't have a compiler.

Also, I haven't been able to compile the ruby-zlib pacakge from RAA, so 
I'm not sure I want to rely on it.

Can anyone suggest a good way of solving this?  All I need is to extract 
one file from a zip archive.  Currently, the program runs the external 
program, unzip.  Perhaps I should ship unzip along with the program?  I 
think I'm leaning towards this direction.

Does this sound like a good approach?

I am on a Solaris system, so I would need some help gathering command-line 
zip programs for the three main platforms: Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Any thoughts, comments and ideas would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera    | OpenPGP KeyID: 9AF77A88
PhD grad student. | 
Mathematics Dept. | "To understand recursion, you must first
UMD, College Park | understand recursion".