Talk:7-Zip

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Free software Portal This article is part of WikiProject Free Software, an effort to create, expand, organize, and improve free software-related articles.
B	rated as B-Class on the assessment scale
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the assessment scale.

I'm going to remove the following two items from the featurelist:

• Fast compression and decompression
• Plugin for FAR Manager

The first seems to purely belong in a product advertisment, not an encyclopedia. The second (the FAR thing) I just don't understand (yeah, I'm being a fascist and taking it out). If someone can explain what this is then it might be okay to replace it (but it needs a decent english sentence explaining it, not just a bulletpoint). -- Finlay McWalter 00:20, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

FAR is a filemanager from rarlabs.com, similar to Midnight Commander. Also we have an article on plugins.

Contents 1 PowerArchiver 2 Support in Gnome 3 7zip compresses much better than bzip2 4 Incorrect information 5 What does the 7 stand for? 6 Size limits? 7 support for rar 8 Changed version to 4.43

[edit] PowerArchiver

I added the external link to PowerArchiver because its how I personally discovered 7Zip. I found PowerArchiver (and thus 7Zip) by accident while looking for a GUI frontend for bzip2 for Windows. My opinion is that PowerArchiver is important in the spread of 7Zip as an example of Free/Open Source Software to show to Windows users. Another good app for this purpose is Firefox. I made a lengthier argument in my blog.

Does this make my addition POV (and is my use of Wiki slang correct? n00b alert, sorry :o) )?

I also discovered AvanceCOMP while meta-researching 7Zip within Wikipedia. My question is which one came first: 7Zip or AdvanceCOMP? -- Lemi4 20:01, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Okay then since Power Archiver has been removed, then has any other program (either open or closed) supported the 7z format? Because it is my (perhaps premature) deduction that Power Archiver was the first program outside of 7-Zip itself to support the format (which makes Power Archiver significant in the historical development of 7-Zip) --Lemi4 18:45, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There are many. See comparison of file archivers.

[edit] Support in Gnome

This CVS checkin suggests that Gnome 2.10 (sheduled release 2005-03-09) will also have 7-Zip support.

2.14 doesn't seem to have any support, however p7zip provides it. - bruce89 15:58, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 7zip compresses much better than bzip2

7zip compresses much better than bzip2; using my own open source project as input (which is mainly ASCII files, but we have a .pdf file in there), the bzip2 file was 737967 bytes long, the rzip file was 602539 bytes long, and the 7-zip file was 564453 or 566981 bytes long, depending on whether I tarred it before compressing. Samboy 02:58, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Is there any obvious reason why it is not used instead of bzip2 and tar.gz in Linux Package management systems? --85.212.16.35 19:35, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

It isn't nearly as ubiquitous (being 5-10 years newer, developed on win32 first & with *nix versions as an afterthought, and not being embraced by GNU (for example, not being supported explicitly by tar). --Karnesky 20:17, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Incorrect information

This statement is incorrect: It is the first archiver to offer a special 64-bit version for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

Squeez (www.speedproject.de) was the first to offer a native x64 archiver!

Correct. x64 squeez beta: 04-2005, stable 05-2005; x64 7-zip beta:07-2005, stable 12-2005. -- Karnesky 15:57, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What does the 7 stand for?

It would be nice to have a "trivia" section that explained what the 7 stands for, either here or in the 7z article. -- wr 9-feb-2006

Re: It stands for nothing, obviously. zip stands for zip (compressing method) and 7 stands for 7 (lucky number). No need in "Trivia" section, maybe only "Trivial" instead... --Yuriy, 17 Mar 2006

Re: If you are interested what Igor himself says about it, see: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1429172&forum_id=45797:

Now I don't remember reasons for such name (it was in 1998). Maybe there was thought that starting from "7" allows to be in first places in lists sorted by name. (Igor Pavlov, 2006-01-27 03:53)

--84.142.191.237 10:47, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Size limits?

What are the system limits when using 7zip ie max size of files, largest file to zip, max size of archive. Is this OS specific? Does it vary between 7zip and zip format?

I can't see this in the 7-zip docs.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Newschapmj1 (talk • contribs).

It is partially file system dependent. FAT32 has a max file size of 4 gigabyte. NTFS has a max file size of 16 terabyte. 7-Zip or 7z might have some limit too though. If you look at the 7z article, you see that it mentions that it can handle up to approx 16 exabytes. -- Frap 17:31, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

The zip standard is limited to 4 GB of data or 65,555 files. Some archivers are able to put more in than this, but then some can't & some won't be able to extract from this large archives. --Karnesky 17:37, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

How come everyone thinks that every thing is a promotion??

Not everybody thinks everything is promotion, but Wikipedia has a NPOV policy that should be followed and you have to keep your eyes open, because some people tend to use Wikipedia as a marketing platform, and promote their products or services, or write articles about them "in very good light", or they write stuff about their own products, or create articles about small piece of software that nobody ever heard of, just because they made it and want draw attention to it. -- Frap 10:34, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] support for rar

is the support for rar reverse engineered or was it because this program started as non-free and it was inherited? --MarSch 11:58, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Neither. unrar source is distributed under an almost open license that forbids using it to build a RAR archiver. The dll included with 7-zip is under a LGPL-like license which has this (nonfree) exception. --Karnesky 13:23, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changed version to 4.43

I've changed the version from 4.42 to 4.43 AppliArt 19:47, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Uh, why? 4.42 is still the newest version ... Jasonn 03:03, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

4.43 is the beta. I cleaned it up so that it lists 4.42 as stable & 4.43 as a preview release. I also fixed release dates & generalized the text of the main article (which improves readability, makes it easier to update, and will prevent conflicting information). --Karnesky 01:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)