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

[Nick Sabalausky]

"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.