Re: Why Vimball archives are evil?

Tom wrote:
> For example,
>
> now that many users (at least some that I know) are using the plugin
> loader pathogen, all the plugins are installed as
> ~/.vim/<plugin_name>/ftplugin/foo.vim. Installing with a vimball
> would place the files in their original vim directories.
>
> I ask you; What is wrong with tar.gz?

tar.gz is the format I've always used for my plugin. Recently, I've
begun to wonder whether this might dissuade some Windows users from
downloading. I don't use Windows much anymore, but when I did, I
typically had Cygwin installed, so gzipped tar files weren't a problem.
I suspect, however, that many Windows users don't have Cygwin, and
without it, I'm not sure that the average Windows user would know what
to do with a gzipped tar file. I did an un-scientific survey of plugins
on the Vim site and concluded that .zip was a much more popular archive
format than tar.gz. Although my personal preference is for tar.gz, I'm
wondering whether .zip makes more sense, as a sort of "lowest common
denominator": I rarely, if ever, have issues opening .zip files on a
Linux system, but have to use Linux tools to open tar.gz files on a
Windows system. Thus, the choice of .zip for plugin archives might be
analogous to the use of Unix line endings for plugin scripts, on the
grounds that either Unix or DOS format works on Windows, but only Unix
format works on Linux.

Is there an official recommendation on this subject? I haven't noticed
any guidelines on the scripts upload page, which simply refers to a
"collection of bundled files". I seem to remember at some point seeing a
script page that provided both .zip and some other format, but I'm not
sure how this would work in practice: the upload file dialog allows you
to specify only one file, so each archive format would have to be
uploaded separately: i.e., distinct version numbers and release notes
(though I suppose they could be identical).

Thanks,
Brett Stahlman

>
> gr,
>
> Tom Wieland
>
> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 10:43 PM, Israel Chauca F.
> <israelvarios@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>> That's it, I'd like to know the reasons behind so much opposition against plugins being released as vimball archives.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Israel
>>
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