[Libreoffice] Tar / Zip wobbly

Tor Lillqvist tlillqvist at novell.com
Wed Oct 27 02:43:27 PDT 2010


> Bear in mind tar is a perfectly good extraction utility (that, in its
> gnu form is probably quite capable of coping with zips), 

No it is not.

> what the h***
> are people doing assuming that zip is available on a *nix system!?

> but I still stand by
> my comment "what is zip doing on a nix system?"

If you are going to work with some kind of programming related to ODF (Open Document Formats), having zip and unzip is definitely highly recommended in order to be able to manipulate such files.

It might come as a surprise to you, but the zip format is widely used also on "*nix". ODF documents are actually (SHOCK, HORROR), zip files. (So are .jar files, for instance.)

And if the LibreOffice build does take for granted that zip is available, that is a relatively reasonable thing to do IMHO. At least in a Windows build the LibreOffice build mechanism packs some stuff into zip files and then later unpacks it (yeah, weird, but then lots of things are...).

So please, do submit a patch to add an explicit check to the LibreOffice configury for zip and unzip, if you think such a check is needed.

--tml




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