libarchive VS 7-Zip-zstd

29. October 2021 At this point Jia Tan pops up, and the first thing we see from him is an innocuous patch to the xz repository, and while a lot of people believe he started out trying his luck with another library also known as libarchive, this is not the case, I would bet it’s more of a backup looking at the dates, being that there are a few days in between as shown in this commit.

Potentially malicious commit by same author on libarchive: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/1609

Full agreement, and with the addition of xpk¹/xfd² as natural extensions to that extensibility too. I see things like xfd supporting xz¹, and I'm simultaneously amazed that it exists and happy that I don't need to do xz {,de}compression on 68k ;)

I guess we have something similar-ish with libarchive⁴, but nobody(including me) has pushed the extra mile to get file dialogs to support random compression and decompression formats.

Beyond OT: I didn't realise how much stuff was still going on at aminet, but I love love LOVE that people are still dropping new car sets for Geoff Crammond's F1GP.

¹ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xpk_User

² http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfdmaster

³ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfd_lzma.lha

⁴ https://www.libarchive.org/

I don't have a preview channel install handy to check, but apparently they're using libarchive so here's the full list assuming they expose everything it supports:

https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...

As announced at the Build conference back in May, this build adds native support for reading additional archive file formats using the libarchive open-source project such as

LibarchiveFormats · libarchive/libarchive Wiki · GitHub

Seems what they're using is BSD-liscensed: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki

Do you consider rar a standard? It's a pretty good format, even though there aren't any good open-source implementations. But if you're willing to pay for your software, WinRAR command line versions are available for most platforms.

7zip is the most obvious free alternative. There is also a 7zip fork that offers zstd [1]. The command line experience for 7zip isn't very good however.

1: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

Check out https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

There's also this fork which supports additional compressions: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

7-zip is actually not a bad option, but I'd strongly advise using the fast-lzma2 codec, because, well, it is waay faster, and might even give you better ratios, depending on how you use it. You can find an implementation here, and it is compatible with traditional 7-zip (you can decompress it on any computer with any newish version of 7z)

Hi, PeaZip can use McMilk's additional compression codecs for 7z format (Zstandard, Brotli, Lizard, etc), https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

You can extract the files yourself with 7Zip. You can install 7Zip from here and then install this plugin to extract ZStandard files, or you can directly install the modified 7Zip with the plugin already from that plugin page. Then simply open the zst file you downloaded with 7Zip and extract it.