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Best Format for Archive Distribution?
Meostro asks: "I'm looking for the best format to use to distribute arbitrary datasets. Tarballs compressed with gzip seem to be the most common thing out there, with zip coming in a close second. What advanced compression packages are the most widely recognized or available on the widest array of systems? Cross-platform compatibility is my most important goal, followed by compression ratio, decompression time, compression time and extra features (solid archives, support for multiple files, etc.). I'm starting up a free data site to provide test data for anything you can imagine: images for compression and format interpretation, text and audio for language processing, programming language examples to test parsing, and more. I hope this will grow to be a significant (read: multi-gigabyte) archive, so I want to start off right with my distribution format. Right now the plan is data.tar.bz2, but i'm open to anything that will give me better compression as long as it's available for Linux, Windows and Mac."
Similar to rar I've found that ACE (www.winace.com) in maximum compression compresses most things better than RAR and is similar in fuctionality (it supports rar as well)
Its linux verion is called unace and there is a macunace as well. Sadly these programs are a bit harder to find on the website but they are there.
Luckly gentoo knows it so you can simply emerge unace.