Actually, I'm starting to like .tgz. With .tgz you wouldn't be able to run
the program without extracting the archive, but if you store the archive as
.tar, there would be no problem. .tgz could be used for network
transmission, and the archive could either be installed or stored as a .tar
in a standard location. And after all, Archive::Tar is already there.
Another advantage I see on tar and gzip is that they are used by GNU, so I'm
pretty sure there probably wouldn't be any licensing issues, and I'm not
quite sure .zip doesn't use LZW, the same compression method of GIF...
I don't know if it would be nice or bad to provide Mac with .sea and .bin (I
think they also have .hqx, ???). Standardizing is still an issue here...
Anyway, if various archive formats are decided, there should be (either
bundled with Perl or provided as a CGI service so that the user could
request an archive in a determined format) an utility to convert a package
from one format to another. Otherwise, developer's life would be harder...
- Branden
