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Gandalf Parker said:
I know that its difficult to word a poll in an unbiased manner but sheeeesh.... 
"I am unwilling or unable"? If the poll just said rar, zip, gz, exe, or installer.. and had no other words to give any clues.. then I would probably have chosen zip.
I guess if my only choices were between RAR or EXE then I would choose rar for SEIV mods.
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Zip was never an option... There was no bias. This was never meant as a general format poll; it was only meant to determine if there is any need to continue adding the self-extracting modules. I may not have made that entirely clear...
Quote:
Arkon said:
Yeah, I noticeed it was becoming popular, so I got WinRAR back in my Windows days. And I'm pretty sure I have one for Linux. My question is why. I used it to archive some MPEG's, then some JPEG's and it did only 1% compression, no better than Winzip really.
Do people like the splitting ability, the advanced repair ability, or does everyone just hate the zip format now that Microsoft started bundling it with XP?
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As Alneyan mentioned, JPEGs are already highly compressed. No archive compression algorithm can do very much with a file that is already as compressed as a JPEG. Only relatively uncompressed or completely uncompressed files can be compressed very much. Compare archives of text files and bitmaps, two completely uncompressed file formats. Wave files work too. The point is that ZIP is a very innefficient format compared to pretty much all other archive formats. It is an obselete format. It is just not a proprietary format, or highly associated with open source, and it is currently the most popular format, so it is the only one that Microsoft chose to support natively in XP. Unless SP 2 added Gzip support...
The other advanced features are a plus, but there are a lot of other archive formats that have them too (such as ACE and possibly 7zip and Gzip, but I am not too familiar with those). Rarsoft just plays the marketing game better.
