[Lazarus] Bug tracker file formats: 7z prohibited?

[Reinier Olislagers]

On 22-7-2012 12:12, Bart wrote:
> On 7/21/12, Reinier Olislagers <reinierolislagers at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I noticed that in issue 22455, Bart Broersma says:
>>> Please don't use .7z as compress format, it isn't supported out of the box
>>> on many platforms.
>>
>> If we shouldn't use 7z files, which format should we use then? zip?
>> .tar.gz? AFAICT, these suffer from the same problems (e.g. no built in
>> support on Win98 platforms and/or various unix flavours)?
>>
> 
> I might actually be the only Lazarus user that uses Win9x (WinMe in
> fact), but my remark wasn't written with that in mind. Even on Win7
> .7z needs an external application to view, whereas almost all modern
> OS's (past 2000) have native support for at least .zip.

That may be true for Windows, but as I said is not necessarily true on
Unixes/Linux.

I concur with Juha that accepting contributions is much more important
than telling people what not to do because "no native support" really
shouldn't be a big issue for a developer reviewing patches.

On Windows, just installing 7zip (portable) will get you 7z, .tar.gz,
.zip extract support as well as support for a lot of other archives.
AFAIR, same for Peazip (written in Lazarus).

Once people start making regular contributions, zip does seem to be the
most well-supported format in general... either natively, as you said,
or by widely available packages. Even then, a tgz makes a lot of sense
if reporting Linux/OSX/Unix bugs as support for these is often built in
(who knows, it may be always, but I'm not even less of an
AIX/Solaris/BSD expert than a Linux distribution connoiseur)

If some sort of enforcement is to be done (or not), I'd suggest at least
editing
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Creating_A_Patch
to match decisions; this way we can makes sure there's a consistent
message to patch submitters.

The message we're sending is the reason I brought it up.

Thanks,
Reinier