[Clipart] Use 7Zip for the Open Cliparts distribution

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 10:20:30AM -0400, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.com> writes:
> 
> >    * Is this format sufficiently widespread to be of actual use?
> >      (Too many options can make things more confusing for users)
> 
> Speaking from experience, there are an infinite number of formats that
> people will ask us to support for one reason or another.
 
True, and I think you and I are in agreement, however I've learned from
experience not to dismiss things too quickly.  This is kind of a deja vu
for me because the first time I heard of bzip2 was due to a user request
very much like this one (he even offered to help set it up).  I
dismissed it out of hand at the time for a variety of reasons (dang new
fangled technology!), but then had to eat my words within a few months
when a bunch more users requested it.  ;-)

I learned my lesson though.  When Mike Hearn came to me about doing
Autopackage for Inkscape, I'd never heard of it and it sounded pretty
"blue sky", but I told him that if he would set it up and provide
support, we'd certainly accept it.  I think it turned out to be a good
decision.  Autopackage was not a widely known format, so benefitted by
having Inkscape as an example.  It's benefitted Inkscape a lot too,
especially for users on RPM-based systems that lacked the more up to
date versions of Inkscape.  Both projects gained both technically
(dependency management for autopackage, bin reloc for inkscape), and in
terms of indirectly shared PR.

Now here we are again with 7zip...  A new format that isn't widespread,
but seems to have some growing support in the community.  We've had at
least a couple users with interest in it.  There's a variety of reasons
why it probably doesn't seem like a worthwhile format for us to provide,
but you know, my thinking is, as long as someone's willing to set it up
and support it, heck why not?  Some of our users might appreciate it,
and maybe by lending our support, it'll become a bit more popular and
widespread. 

Anyway, I'd say let's invite the 7zip proposers to get involved in
adding it to our release scripts.  I wouldn't imagine it'd be too hard
to do.  There's two weeks 'til the next release, that should be plenty
of time for the 7zippers to get it working.  :-)

Bryce