18 May
2005
18 May
'05
8:45 p.m.
Randy McLaughlin declared on Wednesday 18 May 2005 10:26 pm:
Lately I've been using self-extracting zip files.
The reason is that
just by renaming the file from *.exe to *.zip most decompressors
handle it just fine and for 99% of the people it includes the software
to decompress it.
So, to fan the flames, what's wrong with tar? There's a lot more
machines I know of that can easily handle tar files than zip files...
Even WinZip can decompress tar files... while I still had a running
Windows machine, I used WinZip to decompress tar files several times.
Plus, tar is an (intentionally) open format; gnu tar is available for
lots of different platforms, and it's even easy to write your own tar
extractor.
Especially for long term archiving, I think that things like simple, open
formats are more important than making sure that everyone's grandma can
figure out how to use the archive... ie, assuming that the person has a
grasp of being able to learn new things, and some idea of logic are IMO
reasonable assumptions.
Pat
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