> I definitely would go for either .zip or .tar.gz. I think .zip on Windows > is preferable but as .tar.gz is supported by Winzip it's OK too. > I don't think it's right to start educating windows users like Gabor says. > It has nothing to do with bzip2 being hard but with the fact that barely > anyone has it installed under Windows.
Let's see who downloads the manual: a) A guy who used PHP before b) A guy who is new to PHP In either case, that guy will program in a language, write source code, set permissions on a server, upload via FTP, and do many other things not automated by click-and-play style software. We have no WYSIWYG editor for PHP, PHP is not about clicking 15-20, and putting up a new application. PHP is programming. Cannot we expect from that guy to download a small bzip executable, and go to the command line to issue *one* command and extract that bz2 file? Just go through the PHP installation instructions for Windows/Apache, where guys need to unzip a package, rename files, move some to the system dir, move some to the windows dir, edit a text file for configuration. Can we expect that guy mentioned above to do this, if he cannot even issue *one* command to extract a file? I think no, we cannot. Those users should not be treated lamers. They are going to program in a language, which is much more complex, than running a command line copy-pasted from an FAQ. BTW. about bzip2 availability we can think of putting a small bunzip to the windows binary zip and installer distributions to make sure, that guys with PHP already downloaded bzip2 availability is not a problem. License questions are important here, though... BTW why don't we provide a .doc format of the manual? Guys on windows most likely have word than acrobat reader... Because it gives nothing more than pdf. PDF is cross platform, smaller, etc. Goba
