zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Patrick Finnegan]

Randy McLaughlin declared on Wednesday 18 May 2005 10:26 pm:
> Lately I've been using self-extracting zip files.  The reason is that
> just by renaming the file from *.exe to *.zip most decompressors
> handle it just fine and for 99% of the people it includes the software
> to decompress it.

So, to fan the flames, what's wrong with tar?  There's a lot more 
machines I know of that can easily handle tar files than zip files...

Even WinZip can decompress tar files...  while I still had a running 
Windows machine, I used WinZip to decompress tar files several times.  
Plus, tar is an (intentionally) open format; gnu tar is available for 
lots of different platforms, and it's even easy to write your own tar 
extractor.

Especially for long term archiving, I think that things like simple, open 
formats are more important than making sure that everyone's grandma can 
figure out how to use the archive... ie, assuming that the person has a 
grasp of being able to learn new things, and some idea of logic are IMO 
reasonable assumptions.  

Pat
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