On Wednesday, 21 December 2011 at 19:30:55 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
I often wonder why the zip file format doesn't incorporate 7z.
ZIP and 7z are nothing more than a container. The default and
usually only supported compression method in .zip files is
deflate - the very same one used in gzip and usually
created/decoded with the zlib library.
7z can contain data packed in many formats (as supported by
7-Zip, the standard implementation), but the most common one is
LZMA. LZMA (the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm) has been
developed by Igor Pavlov (7-Zip's creator) since 1998. LZMA is
frequently used outside 7-Zip (e.g. there are *nix LZMA tools,
similar to gzip, with which you can easily create .tar.lzma
archives).
Now, to answer your question: according to their website, WinZip
starting with version 12 supports creating ZIP archives with LZMA
compression - but, of course, to unpack them you need an
archiving tool that can understand such ZIP files. It's likely
that such software is even more rare that 7-Zip itself, and will
result in more confusion ("Why can't I open this ZIP file? I can
open any other ZIP file but not this one...").
