On 2020-08-18, at 21:28:09, Guy Harris wrote:
On Aug 17, 2020, at 12:01 PM, Juergen Naeckel via wrote:
... However… First of all, a tar.gz is Linux specific.
Or, rather, UN*X specific; Linux Torvalds was about 10 years old when tar was first broadly available (with V7 in 1979, I think), and gzip came out a little more than a year after somebody announced that they were "doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones", although it did support bash and gcc when that announcement was made. :-)
".gz" is non-POSIX. z/OS UNIX doesn't supply a gzip or zip. And Single UNIX much prefers "pax" over "tar" nowadays.
But...
True, you could install additional Windows software. But, that might not go well with customers of mine. I think a ZIP would be acceptable for both worlds.
I suspect WinZip is tar-savvy. But is WinZip in base Windows? (Cygwin rules!)
...offering both a tarball and a zipball might be a good idea (zip exists as a UN*X command, and ships with at least UN*Xes, but UN*X users may be less used to it).
Again, non-POSIX, but distributed with (most) Linux. Various zip software may differ in treatment of symlinks and directory links. Info-ZIP for example, expands links unless an option is supplied. - gil