.ZIP Standard to Fragment?

fudgefactor7 writes "As IDG.NET tells us, the venerable .ZIP compression standard is about to undergo a bit of a schism. PKWare and WinZip, the "big two" in the .ZIP format biz are (unfortunately) going to be making their respective releases incompatible (to an extent) and an archive made with one may not be accessible from another. The problem lies with PKWare not giving information to WinZip, thus making WinZip to go it alone."

Comments

More importantly..

[grub]

What will my unix *zip programs be compatible with?

Does it really matter?

[jdhutchins]

How much does this really matter? First of all, I bet most people are still using their unregestered shareware winzip from ages ago. Most people know that the zip encryption is pretty much worthless, so they don't bother. The people who want an encrypted zip file are probably going to encrypt it with a quality encryption program, such as gpg or pgp, AFTER they have it zipped. The person on the other end unencrypts it and then opens it. I know the article said "95% of the time it'll work", but I bet it will be more like "It'll work 99.9999% of the time".
Also, the basic format isn't changing. It's just the encryption part, so zip files will still be usuable by nearly everyone.

PKWare is hosed.

[fmaxwell]

Frankly, with the popularity of Winzip, PKWare is making a grave error. PKZip, while perfectly good, is running a distant second in popularity based on my observations. Making their product produce incompatible ZIP files is a sure way of eroding their market share even further.

You do that sort of thing when you are the industry leader. This would be like Corel deciding that they were going to set a new standard for .DOC files that Microsoft would not be able to read. The result would be that Corel would lose their remaining six users of their word processor.

Re:Splitting Those ZIPs

[larry bagina]

maybe it's the tar.gz format that's lame. If you there's a gzipped tarball of 1,000 files, and you want to extract only the last one, you have to wait for the entire file to decompress.

That may be the unix way, but it's not the efficient way.

You know what I find funny about all this?

[xQuarkDS9x]

What I find funny is that PKWARE will basically die off from this, no one I know from the workplace, friends, or even home users use anything PKWARE related. They all use Winzip or another windows tool. Hell it's been 10 year's since I even used PKZIP from PKWARE, and back then I was on a 486 machine with DOS 5.

It's also funny how people are still using a archiving format thats been around since 1988 at least, it's OLD and compresses like crap. Especially when there are SUPERIOR and much better compression formats out there such as

ARJ
JAR
RAR
UC2
ACE

All of these formats compress better then ZIP, yet you are hard pressed to find ARJ/ACE/JAR/UC2 files on the net, RAR files you may find here and there.