On Sep 16, 2009, at 03:01, Anders F Björklund wrote:
Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Using .7z isn't a good option in the same way that using .zip
isn't optimal.
In what way is .zip not optimal? It is the built-in compression
method offered by the Mac OS X Finder, so at least somebody at
Apple thought it was a good choice for something. And software
distributed as .zip archives works perfectly fine in MacPorts. It's
not optimal in that the compression isn't very good, but in that
way it would be completely unlike .7z, which can use lzma
compression which is very good.
You are mixing archive formats with compression formats...
It's hard not to, since they're so related. :)
The .tar format is better suited to distributing UNIX files,
whereas zip or 7z might be better for Windows or something*.
But .zip and .gz use the same compression, and .7z and .lzma
use the same compression, so it's only about the archiving.
The ImageMagick developers have chosen to distribute their software
in many different formats. In decreasing order of size, they
are: .zip, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, and .7z. I chose .7z because
it is the smallest. I don't see a problem with this.
I don't have a major problem with it either (if I appeared to),
just like you could use the .zip file instead of the .tar.gz.
Just saying that generally it would be preferred to use .tar.xz,
so you probably want to be adding that "use_xz" flag to MacPorts.
Yes, I think we should add it too, but I am uncomfortable doing so
until a stable version of xz exists. It does not seem right for a core
MacPorts functionality to depend on an unstable version of a software
package.
For instance, 7z doesn't store UNIX owner/group permissions...
I read that claim on the Wikipedia page, but am unable to substantiate
it. The 7z archive of ImageMagick does have the execute bit of the
configure script set, for example.
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