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Decompression Chamber, or DC as I will call it throughout the documentation, is essentially a "shell" application which wraps the excellent command-line decompression utilities written by several authors. There are three major motivations for this product:
1) To provide a single interface for archive set testing, repair, and extraction of multiple compression types. In particular, support for those compression types popular in the Usenet communities.
2) To enhance the feature sets provided by the graphical user interface (GUI) versions of the command-line products.
3) To improve support for large numbers of large archive sets.
Because this is a shell wrapping other utilities, you must properly license and install the utilities you use with DC. If you are trying to avoid licensing of the products that DC supports, then DC is not for you. Furthermore, because the command-line decompression applications generally are not distributed without their GUI counterparts, you will probably have to install the full Windows versions of their software. Therefore, DC generally does not evade the need to install the GUI version of the supported products.
Due to these limitations, DC is definately not for everyone. But I believe it will become a popular tool for improving the efficiency of multiple archive set testing and extraction.
Included with any licensed distrubution of DC is a file called "DecompressionChamberStatus.txt". This standard text file, often referred to as a version control file, lists both the "todo" list of intended features and bugs and also a list of features and bugs fixed already according to their version number. It is a very good idea to read this file before working with DC as the first section will inform you about features planned for upcoming versions, bugs that you may experience when using DC. Then, the second section will list the latest changes that may not be reflected in the documentation.
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