HA is a small file archiver utility. It's main goal is to offer
maximum compression without fancy addons.
HA is an archiver which was released in january 1993 as version
0.98.
After that its author had plans to improve speed, archive handling etc. which would have
required total rewrite of the code. For that author unfortunately could not find time.
Because there has been quite considerably interest for internals of HA (especially for the
HSC compression method) author decided to make a source level release from his 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.