[Clipart] Use 7Zip for the Open Cliparts distribution

[Nathan Eady]

Glenn Randers-Pehrson <glennrp> wrote:
> Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> 
> Recent SourceForge statistics for libpng show about 20,200
 > tar.bz2 downloads compared to 16,200 tar.gz and 12,700 zip.
 > It seems that bzip2 is actually making some inroads.

Yes, it is gaining inroads.  But, for a compression format, inroads
are gained first among developers and powerusers, the sort of people
who compile their own software, the sort of people who download
libpng (as such, rather than as part of some application's installer).
I strongly suspect that the OCAL download numbers would be different.

I'm not saying bzip2 isn't worth supporting.  Even though it's not
widely deployed at this time, it has gained enough mindshare, especially
in the open  source community, that we can reasonably expect it *will*
be widely deployed at some point in the future.  Also it has gained
enough mindshare that not supporting it means a FAQ entry.  Whether
7zip will ever get there, on the other hand, is probably still an
open question at this point.

Besides that, supporting bzip2 is easy:  it's one extra command at
release time, and that's it.  I (or whoever else might happen to do
any given release) don't have to compile the software involved myself,
hunt down libraries, or anything like that, because any remotely recent
distribution that I might happen to be using supports it out of the box.
So, I don't mind supporting bzip2.

I also view it as inevitable that we will eventually have to support
BitTorrent, although its being somewhat more difficult to support
makes me want to put it off until later.  We have other things we
need to spend our time on at the moment.