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)?

Thanks,
Reinier

If you have an example for an issue specific for platform X then you should use a format for platform X.
Otherwise use zip or tar.gz/tgz.

Mattias

That sounds sensible (and I think using zip is a good middle ground for all platforms but I appreciate people's preferences may be different).

Adjusted
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Creating_A_Patch (specified zip/tgz only to keep things simple)

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Reinier Olislagers <

I think Win98 does not support any compression format out of the box.

For me personally this is not an issue because I use Ark (comes with KDE) and it opens pretty much any compression format you can imagine. Also, 7z archiver can be installed to Windows.

Creating artificial limitations for file formats is not a good idea. Getting example projects (and patches) is a valuable thing and it should be encouraged by being flexible. Another similar issue is the patch format. At least earlier the Git patch format was rejected by developers, although Git is especially good for maintaining local branches for people without commit rights.

Regards,
Juha
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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

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

.Zip can be a problem in some very old implementations, where it doesn't handle long file names gracefully. There's at least two variants of (uncompressed) tar still in circulation, Solaris (10) doesn't use the GNU implementation by default but gtar is readily available (I've never tried reading a Solaris-created tar on Linux). The tar I've got on some old MS OSes doesn't have compression, I've not researched what's currently available for e.g. OS/2 and NT.

Juha Manninen wrote

For me personally this is not an issue because I use Ark (comes with KDE) and it opens pretty much any compression format you can imagine. Also, 7z archiver can be installed to Windows.

Sure, but I don't like maintaining a set of compressors for each of the computers I occasionally fix bugs on. Just use zip. If the 7z bit matters, than your case is too big :-)

The only patches I refused were refused because they didn't apply with normal gnu patch and diff. Not because they came from git.