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> Copyright (c) 1989 - 2014, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022

Mostly it seems nutty that, after all these years, they’re still updating the zip spec instead of moving on to a newer format.



The English language is awful, and we keep updating it instead of moving to a newer language.

Some things are used for interoperability, and switching to a newer incompatible thing loses all of its value.


.7z and .tar.* have existed for at least 20 years now, but you are unlikely to see a wild 7z file and .tar.* is isolated to the UNIX space


Tar files also have the miserable limitation of having no index; this means that to extract an individual file requires scanning through the entire archive until you find it, and then continuing to scan through the rest of the archive because a tar file can have the same file path added multiple times.

That makes them useful for transferring an entire set of files that someone will want all or none of, e.g. source code, but terrible for a set of files that someone might want to access arbitrary files from.


Sure, but that's not really a reason to futilely try to spooge oddball algorithms that nobody is going to adopt into the .zip standard.




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