[ros-dev] 7-zip - holy smokes!

[Phillip Susi]

Thomas Weidenmueller wrote:

> I don't think it's a good choice for our public downloads, the avarage 
> user most likely will not know this format. zip still is THE standard.
>
> Best Regards,
> Thomas


What if we did something like cygwin where they just download a small 
setup program which then will ask them what kinds of packages they want, 
and download those, in 7zip format, and then decompress and install them?


>> Self-extracting with 7zip?
>
> not really a good idea when you don't know which operating system the 
> user runs. 


Self extracting zips are fine for windows users, that way they don't 
have to download the program separately.  For people on other platforms, 
they can just download the 7-zip program and use that to extract the 
SFX.  Those who would have to do this ( Linux users ) I think are more 
than capable of doing so. 

>I think what Jokob meant was to have a ZIP with zero compression
>(which'll work like Tar) and zip that collection. The ZIP format
>basically compresses each individual files them binds them together.
>


Essentially that's a workaround to get winzip to create a solid 
archive.  That helps some, but not very much, and makes it more annoying 
to unpack.  A self extracting 7-zip archive would be significantly 
smaller, and easier to unpack than a zip in zip.