On 22-7-2012 12:12, Bart wrote: > On 7/21/12, Reinier Olislagers <[email protected]> wrote: >> I noticed that in issue 22455, Bart Broersma says: >>> Please don't use .7z as compress format, it isn't supported out of the box >>> on many platforms. >> >> If we shouldn't use 7z files, which format should we use then? zip? >> .tar.gz? AFAICT, these suffer from the same problems (e.g. no built in >> support on Win98 platforms and/or various unix flavours)? >> > > I might actually be the only Lazarus user that uses Win9x (WinMe in > fact), but my remark wasn't written with that in mind. Even on Win7 > .7z needs an external application to view, whereas almost all modern > OS's (past 2000) have native support for at least .zip.
That may be true for Windows, but as I said is not necessarily true on Unixes/Linux. I concur with Juha that accepting contributions is much more important than telling people what not to do because "no native support" really shouldn't be a big issue for a developer reviewing patches. On Windows, just installing 7zip (portable) will get you 7z, .tar.gz, .zip extract support as well as support for a lot of other archives. AFAIR, same for Peazip (written in Lazarus). Once people start making regular contributions, zip does seem to be the most well-supported format in general... either natively, as you said, or by widely available packages. Even then, a tgz makes a lot of sense if reporting Linux/OSX/Unix bugs as support for these is often built in (who knows, it may be always, but I'm not even less of an AIX/Solaris/BSD expert than a Linux distribution connoiseur) If some sort of enforcement is to be done (or not), I'd suggest at least editing http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Creating_A_Patch to match decisions; this way we can makes sure there's a consistent message to patch submitters. The message we're sending is the reason I brought it up. Thanks, Reinier -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
