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7-Zip 25.00

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Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#61
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It ships with a very terrible wizard. Terrible how? It just needs to zip and unzip and it does that fine for most users. What else do you expect for casual users? For power usurers there's 7zip or WinRar or other solutions. > Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck? And what stopped you from saying that? HN rules say comments should be in good faith. What you said has clearly different mean…

The Extraction Wizard is a bit clunky opening a dialog box asking where you want to extract things... ...then a brief flash as the decompress happens because it's no longer 1998 and we're not extracting 2 MB of ZIP files on a Pentium 166, ... then you get a silly "complete!" screen with a pre-filled checkbox that spawns another Windows Explorer window by default. Eh, three clunky "wizard" screens is a bit much for a…

That never bothered me. That's a non issues for normal people.

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It ships with a very terrible wizard. Terrible how? It just needs to zip and unzip and it does that fine for most users. What else do you expect for casual users? For power usurers there's 7zip or WinRar or other solutions. > Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck? And what stopped you from saying that? HN rules say comments should be in good faith. What you said has clearly different mean…

When it has bad support for just zip I think phrasing it as windows lacking an unarchiving utility is reasonable enough, and certainly not bad enough to get flagged like the comment currently is. It's not bad faith, jeez. I'm going to go vouch for the comment and hope it survives. And it's only because of that comment that I learned windows 11 finally improves things.

Who's the judge of zip support being 'bad'?

HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm.

There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous.

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defining factor isn't compression/decompression, it's just encoding. You'll see codec used in things like text encoding.

While technically true, the term has been largely co-opted by the A/V realm. It’s pretty rare to hear outside of the context.

You commonly encounter the term when you want to do bytes to string conversions and vice versa on Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it has bad support for just zip I think phrasing it as windows lacking an unarchiving utility is reasonable enough, and certainly not bad enough to get flagged like the comment currently is. It's not bad faith, jeez. I'm going to go vouch for the comment and hope it survives. And it's only because of that comment that I learned windows 11 finally improves things.

Who's the judge of zip support being 'bad'? HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm. There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous.

> Who's the judge of zip support being 'bad'?

> HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm.

It acts kind of like a folder but tons of things don't work when you navigate into it. And it hasn't been improved in 20 years. It's bad.

It's significantly worse for a random person because stuff breaks and they don't know why. At least if you try to run an exe it asks about extracting the whole thing so that one case is less likely to blow up.

> There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous.

Just the fact that it doesn't work for any other archive format is enough to make the original comment merely sloppy wording. It's not bad faith or disingenuous. Don't be so judgemental.

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's the judge of zip support being 'bad'? HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm. There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous.

> Who's the judge of zip support being 'bad'? > HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm. It acts kind of like a folder but tons of things don't work when you navigate into it. And it hasn't been improved in 20 years. It's bad. It's significantly worse for a random person because stuff breaks and they don't know why. At least if you try to run an exe it asks about extracting th…

>Just the fact that it doesn't work for any other archive format

Humor me, how popular or other non-zip formats for average Joe's uses?

I'm a paper user and can't remember the last time I encountered a non zip format.

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who's the judge of zip support being 'bad'? > HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm. It acts kind of like a folder but tons of things don't work when you navigate into it. And it hasn't been improved in 20 years. It's bad. It's significantly worse for a random person because stuff breaks and they don't know why. At least if you try to run an exe it asks about extracting th…

>Just the fact that it doesn't work for any other archive format Humor me, how popular or other non-zip formats for average Joe's uses? I'm a paper user and can't remember the last time I encountered a non zip format.

I'm not sure but I've sure seen a lot of winrar memes.

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While technically true, the term has been largely co-opted by the A/V realm. It’s pretty rare to hear outside of the context.

Rare for people who don't deal with encoding and decoding maybe. To be clear the codec implements the compression (or other encoding) algorithm. So when talking about codec's we mean the implementation. But when talking about the algorithm, we are talking about the standard of encoding the encoder or decoder implements.

> Rare for people who don't deal with encoding and decoding maybe.

No, rare in general.

It's a layman's co-opting, and laymen outnumber specialists in every field.

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just the fact that it doesn't work for any other archive format Humor me, how popular or other non-zip formats for average Joe's uses? I'm a paper user and can't remember the last time I encountered a non zip format.

I'm not sure but I've sure seen a lot of winrar memes.

I guess that settles it.

Re: 7-Zip 25.00

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could also maintain an in-memory index so that you can go back after the fact and extract individual files.

That's less helpful than you might imagine - gzip isn't seekable by default; if all you know is the seek point, you still have to decompress everything up to that point to start decompressing from there. And if you have to do that, reading the tar headers as you go isn't a serious burden. What might help is saving the state of the decompressor periodically, rather than just the index in the file. But that's getting p…

Interesting, yeah that makes sense— and I agree, that would be tricky to figure out the proper balance of caching the actual contents somewhere vs just caching the decompressor state, and whether that caching goes to RAM or disk. There isn't an obvious right answer for either, nor is there necessarily a right way to expose that option to the user.

Can definitely see why systems like python's wheel would choose zip as it's just always been natively seekable out of the box. I believe Nix now does something similar with flake repo archives being zipfiles in the store, as they can be seeked and evaluated without a full decompression, saving a lot of disk space.

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