[Clipart] Use 7Zip for the Open Cliparts distribution

[Nicu Buculei]

Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Bryce Harrington wrote:
> 
>> The considerations that need to be made are:
>>
>>    * Can this type of file be generated on Linux (since we do our
>>      packaging via Linux)
> 
> 
> 7-Zip itself is a Windows-only program. There has been work on a 
> command-line version that could run on Linux-Intel (but I couldn't get 
> it to work last time).

The command line version for Linux is available here: 
http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/

>>    * Is this format sufficiently widespread to be of actual use?
>>      (Too many options can make things more confusing for users)
> 
> 
> Sadly, it isn't. Even if you got the Linux version working, it would be 
> tied to x86. The design of 7-Zip depends on the CPU being little-endian, 
> so it would exclude PPC and Sparc, and with it Mac OS X, Solaris, and 
> Yellow Dog Linux.

are you sure? I see Debian has packages for a lot of architectures, 
including PPC and Sparc: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/p7zip 
and Fedora has packages for PPC: 
http://mirror.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/ppc/p7zip-4.16-1.ppc.rpm

> But even on x86-Linux, 7-Zip is far from widespread because the command 
> line utility hasn't been forthcomming (last time I checked).

 From what I see, it appears p7zip is lately included in various 
distros: Debian Unstable, Fedora Extras, Mandrake, Gentoo.
As for GUI,  I see support for 7-zip was added in File Roller 2.9 - 
http://fileroller.sourceforge.net/NEWS.html

That being said, I am not very sure how useful is to add yet another 
archive format to the 4 existing ones.
Maybe the NSIS installer for Windows may be made to use 7-zip (instead 
of whatever compression is using now), just like the installer for 
OpenOffice.org.