Expander is unreliable

[Mark Phillips]

On May 4, 2004, Kirk McElhearn wrote:

> On 5/4/04 2:26 PM, "Dale Critchley" <dale at infinityltd.org> wrote:
>
>> I've been downloading a bunch of stuff from VersionTracker & other
>> places, and I've found that about half of it won't 
>> decode/expand/unzip.
>> I'm fairly sure that the downloads are completing, and I'm pretty sure
>> the problem is with Stuffit Expander. Anyone else encounter these
>> problems?
>
> When that's happened I've redownloaded and things worked fine. I'm not 
> sure
> it's Expander; in fact, I wonder if it's not Safari. I Dled a bunch of 
> zip
> archives the other day, and neither Expander nor the Finder could open 
> them.
> I redownloaded them, and they were fine.

I agree that Expander is probably not the problem. I have had similar 
failures with Safari and the built-in FTP in OS X, typically with 
specific sites. I surmise the download does not terminate properly and 
the file is left in an unusable state.

Several years ago I wrote an FTP client and while the protocol is well 
known I found that servers can be configured oddly and network latency 
can upset the flow of data. These conditions make it hard to write a 
bullet proof FTP client.

To solve the problem, I tried several 3rd party products and settled on 
one called Transit. It seems to work everywhere. Now I will download 
using Safari and if it fails I use Transit. On some sites, where Safari 
consistently has trouble, I simply use Transit.

HTH,

Mark Phillips
Mophilly & Associates
On the web at http://www.mophilly.com
On the phone at 619 444-9210