[LBo] Re: warning when unzipping files

[Billy Pollifrone]

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Stefan Waidele wrote:
> Anita Lewis schrieb:
>> [...]
>> That doesn't explain why this happens,
> 
> Oh, it does explain. Let me (try to) translate to plain english:
> 
> Self-extracting Zipfiles are a platform-dependant hack. The fact that
> they can be extracted by regular unzippers is not due to the "clever
> design" of the hack itself, but to the forgivefullness of the
> unzip-program, which merely spits out the warning instead of aborting
> with an "invalid input file error".
> 
> Making sense?
> 
> Stefan
> 
> 

This all dates to a time that Windows didn't come with any support for
zip files at all and you couldn't send one to a user that didn't know
what the heck it was. Well, you could, but that's a different point.
Winzip put this small loader in the front that was just enough to run a
small gui and unpack the zip file for them. Now, Windows and many Linux
distros support zip out of the box, so SFX zip files are not needed
except in odd cases.

If you ask me, it was thinking that many companies are happy to do.
Don't educate the user but rather do it for them. Yes, you get more
users and even better, you get more dependent users.


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