On 06/12/2012 05:55 AM, Dave Cramer wrote:
> How about a tar file for the downloads. I certainly don't run windows.
Just for the future: 7zip works well on Linux. In fact, I strongly
prefer it to tar+gzip. It offers better compression ratios and much more
robust archive files.
yum install p7zip
apt-get install p7zip-full
Handily, as well as its own native high-compression-ratio archive
format, 7zip deals with all those annoying RARs and ARJs and all that
mess that people send around.
(Digressing somewhat:)
I don't understand why *nix users stick to tar. As a long-time Linux
user, I avoid it and think tar files are obsolete. Creating an archive
then compressing it with a stream cypher means that a one-bit error
renders the archive completely destroyed after the error bit, so it's
not good for backups. The compression ratio offered by tar+gzip is poor,
so it isn't much good for file exchange unless you ditch gzip for bzip2,
which is _really_ slow and still doesn't offer great compression ratios.
Better IMO to stick to zip files, or 7zip when compression ratio
matters. IMO about the only use for tar is if you need to archive device
nodes, POSIX ACLs, xattrs, etc, in which case `star' or GNU tar are
better choices.
--
Craig Ringer