On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, David Cantrell wrote:
> Oh I don't care if the browser doesn't support it, just whether there is
> common Doze software to uncompress it later like there is for tarballs.
Well, everyone using Windows is likely to be using either a copy of
WinZip (unpaid for, of course) or if they're using XP the system has
*finally* added capabilities for dealing with compressed formats.
Poking around WinZip's site, I can't find any mention of bzip / bzip2.
asking Google about "winzip bzip2" turns up phrases such as
Unfortunately WinZip does not unzip bzip2.... [trolltech.com]
Of course, some day WinZip will add bzip2.... [redhat.com]
etc. The most fruitful links seem to point to Cygwin, which while
appreciated is about as likely as saying "just install Linux."
Actually, that pretty much *is* what they're saying... :)
Searching for "windows xp bzip2" turns up a link for PowerArchiver, which
while apparently nicer than WinZip, isn't a program that most people seem
to be running (or, arguably, will ever see a need for, as long as WinZip
does .zip and .zip is all they're interested in).
A poke around MS's techpubs site suggests that Win-Me-Oh-God-NO was the
first version to support the .zip format natively (that only took them 15
years -- impressive), but apparently it's the only compression format that
MS has any interest in. I see no mention of bzip, gzip, sit, hqx, etc.
So... no, bzip file support is unlikely unless they're savvy enough to
have installed Cygwin, PowerArchiver, or similar tools. Which most Windows
users probably haven't & probably never will.
Their loss.
--
Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/
massively parallel, adj.
1 Hypergeometry (Of two right lines) nonintersecting and many
megaparsecs apart even at the point at infinity.
2 (Of a computer architecture) employing 2^N microprocessors where N
depends on Intel's current discount structure; esp. of a system
massively searching for parallel advances in the programming arts.
Compare MASSIVELY SERIAL.
-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
