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

[Alvaro]

El 22/12/2011 8:03, Jonathan M Davis escribió:
> On Thursday, December 22, 2011 01:53:00 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> If you're a programmer, or even just a power user, you have absolutely no
>> excuse not to *already* have a 7z-capable program installed.
>>
>> Christ, even the "least-common-denominator" piracy scene has standardized on
>> rar which has *exactly* the same accessibility level as 7z. (All the major
>> rar programs on windows already support 7z, and on unix, getting 7z is a
>> one-liner, no harder than getting rar: On debian-based: "sudo apt-get
>> install p7zip-full" - *if* it isn't already installed by default, which it
>> often is.)
>>
>> I'm normally one of the biggest fans of "don't exclude anyone", but what the
>> hell programmer is limited to whatever archive support just happens to be
>> built into Windows? Seriously, who *doesn't* have at the very least WinRAR,
>> or something akin to it?
>>
>> I'm personally ok with DMD coming in zip, but zip's alleged ubiquity is just
>> not a valid reason.
>
> I don't even know the last time that I saw a 7zip file. They're incredibly rare
> in my experience. I probably have a program installed on my system which will
> open them, since I'm running Linux, and it would have been easy enough to have
> that pulled in with the package manager for something-or-other, but I just
> don't see those kind of files, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see
> developers' boxes without the ability to open them - especially Windows boxes,
> where you'd have to go find such a program and install yourself as opposed to
> it getting pulled in by the package manager.
>
> If you're trying to have an archival format that pretty much any computer can
> open out of the box, zip is the only option. If you're restricting yourself to
> Linux computers specifically, there are definitely more options, but Windows can
> only handle zip files. For all other archival formats, the user has to track
> down a program which can handle them. No, that's not hard, but it _does_ raise
> the bar of entry somewhat, and there's really nothing wrong with using zip.
> The problem is the slow server (though breaking up the package for each OS
> would help further).l
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I use 7zip everyday and where I work it has become the most common 
archive format (we use Windows and Linux), 7zip is installed by the IT 
people as part of the basic software just as an antivirus and an office 
suite.

And compared to WinRar, 7zip and the 7z format are free and open. When 
packing lots of small files (like in source distributions) 7z is much 
better than Zip.

Other software distributions already switched to 7z from zip (don't 
remember which now).