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

[Don]

On 22.12.2011 17:45, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Jonathan M Davis"<jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  wrote in message
> news:mailman.1834.1324571496.24802.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>> On Thursday, December 22, 2011 06:25:42 a wrote:
>>> Why are you ignoring the statement about 7z having  the same
>>> accessibility
>>> level as rar? Rar files are not rare and users who can open rar files (on
>>> Windows usually with WinRAR or 7zip) can also open 7z files.
>>
>> But not without installing 3rd party software. Windows can handle zip
>> files out
>> of the box. It can't handle the others. rar would have exactly the same
>> problem as 7z files (though from what I've see rar files are much more
>> commonly
>> used). We _could_ use a file format other than zip, but then we'd be
>> requiring
>> that the user download a 3rd party app just to be able to open the file,
>> which
>> is _not_ the case with zip.
>>
>
> Once again:
>
> 1. "If you're a programmer, or even just a power user, you have absolutely
> no
> excuse not to *already* have a 7z-capable program [EDIT: such as WinRAR, for
> instance] installed."
>
> 2. "What the hell programmer is limited to whatever archive support just
> happens to be
> built into Windows?"
>
> Even *in addition* to all of that, the built-in windows support for zip is
> *extremely* dummy^H^H^H^H^Haverage-Joe -oriented. Page after page of
> hand-holding "wizard" *just* to "extract here"? I can't imagine any
> programmer or power user even being capable of putting up with that for more
> than a few days before finally just grabbing WinRAR, etc. And I'm not just
> speculating: Honestly, I've never even known *one* programmer or power user
> who actually used Windows's built-in zip support.

According to sourceforge, 7zip for Windows was downloaded 100 million 
times last year. WinRAR is probably a lot more popular than 7zip.
There are about 1000 million PCs in use worldwide, so it sounds like > 
25% of all Windows users have 7z support. Among developers it must be 
much higher - maybe 90% ?