[...]
> 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.
[...]
On Windows, .zip is the most popular archive format. On Unix, it's
.tar.gz, with .tar.bz2 as a rising contender especially for big recent
projects.
When I was on Windows (on XP), WinZip knew what to do with a .tar.gz
archive: it said that the archive contained nothing but another archive,
asked if I wanted to unpack the latter, and when I said yes, it unpacked
the .tar.gz just like "tar -zxf foobar.tar.gz" would have done on Linux.
OTOH, WinZip didn't know head or tail of the .bz2 format; it could,
however (of course) unpack the .tar obtained by running Cygwin bunzip2
on the .tar.bz2 (but then, if Cygwin is installed, "tar -jxvf
foobar.tar.bz2" can do it in one operation).
I've been told that the 7z or 7zip program (a FOSS program originally
developed for Windows) can pack and unpack the wildest variety of
archives of every kind. IIRC there's a Wikipedia page about it.
One of the arguments that could be raised against the vimball format is
that it involves no compression, but the answer to that is that neither
does the tar format; and it's quite possible to compress either of these
to get a .vba.gz or a .tar.gz which are handled without a hitch by their
respective unpackers (vim and tar).
Best regards,
Tony.
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