Post #4272918

2026-07-31 09:15 UTC

@pq1r@tech.lgbt sure, but for 99.9999% of cases (eg release source downloads on GitHub), the distinctions make no difference. The compression difference is marginal, and pretty much everyone just downloads and unzips the whole thing, doesn’t care about preserving file access times or whatever else. We duplicate storage, processing (eg scanning for vulns) etc to basically just satisfy the fetishes of a few purists IMO.

Replies (1)

@pq1r@tech.lgbt 2026-07-31 09:39

@neilmadden@infosec.exchange if your context is purely software distribution, I would agree that both formats are suitable in principle, but the caveat is OS support. Windows didn't come with a tar utility until "recently" (I want to say Windows 10?) and couldn't open tar from the Explorer GUI until... 24H2 (I had to google that one). There's probably a decent install base without the ability to extract tar. On the other hand, ZIP is not part of the POSIX standard so although the command line utilities are included in all the repos, and as far as I'm aware all of the desktop distributions have them by default both through the GUI and on the command line -the minimal installation of for example Rocky Linux (heavily used as a standard) or Alma Linux (used as a basis for many Docker images) don't include them by default. MacOS being a desktop OS has them both since I think OS X. You could argue that it SHOULD be standardised around one of the formats, but it hasn't yet.

Open ##4339880