On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 1:01 PM, Dave Harper <[email protected]> wrote:

> Interesting - I did not realize that XPI and ZIP files were the same.

The Zip file format was invented by the late Phil Katz of PKWare, and
first used in his PKZip product for MS-DOS.  He explicitly placed the
format in the public domain and released specs for it, so other people
could write software to read and write Zip archives.  They did, and
every archive utility I'm aware of can create and extract them.  (I
use the free and open source 7Zip product, from http://www.7zip.org.)

It's well documented and understood, with lots of freely available
code for dealing with it, so Mozilla's decision to use the Zip format
for extension install files makes sense.  I've done a fair bit of
"bumping" to bypass compatibility problems with Firefox versions by
opening the XPI file for an extension in 7Zip, extracting the
install.rdf file, changing the maxValue field to whatever the current
FF version is, stuffing it back into the archive, then installing the
local copy.

> Dave
_____
Dennis

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