On Tue, 1 Jan 2013, Daniel Herring wrote:
On Tue, 1 Jan 2013, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
OTOH, what about distribution "tarballs" in '.zip' format? They don't
use tar at all ... Time to deprecate them maybe? Is anybody actually
using them? And while at it, what about the even more obscure 'shar'
format?
While I haven't manipulated a shar file in years, but zip is still the
dominant archive format on MS platforms. It is quite common (and a good
practice) for a project to distribute \n newlines in a tarball and \r\n
newlines in a zip archive.
The unzip from Info-ZIP supports the -a option to auto-convert text
files to use MS-DOS line terminations. It is not really necessary to
convert to MS-DOS format while packaging.
Also, it seems that 'notepad' (default for opening .TXT files) is
virtually the only Windows text editing program which fails to deal
with Unix line terminations. Windows development tools have no
problems with Unix line terminations.
For my own project, we have ditched zip and switched to 7-zip instead
because it compresses much better.
BZip is reaching the point of so little value, it looks like it should
be tossed. Gzip files are not much larger and can serve for the case
where the most universal format is needed.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
