Could we use something better than zip for the dmd package?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Wednesday, 21 December 2011 at 19:30:55 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> I often wonder why the zip file format doesn't incorporate 7z.

ZIP and 7z are nothing more than a container. The default and 
usually only supported compression method in .zip files is 
deflate - the very same one used in gzip and usually 
created/decoded with the zlib library.

7z can contain data packed in many formats (as supported by 
7-Zip, the standard implementation), but the most common one is 
LZMA. LZMA (the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm) has been 
developed by Igor Pavlov (7-Zip's creator) since 1998. LZMA is 
frequently used outside 7-Zip (e.g. there are *nix LZMA tools, 
similar to gzip, with which you can easily create .tar.lzma 
archives).

Now, to answer your question: according to their website, WinZip 
starting with version 12 supports creating ZIP archives with LZMA 
compression - but, of course, to unpack them you need an 
archiving tool that can understand such ZIP files. It's likely 
that such software is even more rare that 7-Zip itself, and will 
result in more confusion ("Why can't I open this ZIP file? I can 
open any other ZIP file but not this one...").