On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 10:05:02PM +0100, Barbie [home] wrote: >On 02 September 2003 09:43 Roger Burton West wrote: >> (All of this >> only applies to the Windows world, obviously; I think the parallels in >> Unix, or at least Linux, would be .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, and dodgy >> commercial software with auto-extracting installers like the JRE.) >Why obviously? RAR, ACE, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP formats are all available on both >Windows and many Unix variants.
On Unix, RAR and ACE are only available as binaries, which puts off a lot of people; and neither those nor ZIP preserves file ownership or permission information. So while I'm able to extract most files under Unix, I wouldn't choose those formats for something that I'm originating and plan to share primarily with other Unix users. Roger
