* Marco Schuster <marco(a)harddisk.is-a-geek.org> [Tue, 30 Nov 2010
11:05:09 +0100]:
You can create a zip easily on all major OSes with
drag'n'drop.
Windows supports it IIRC from Win 98 SE and up, a standard Linux by
the tools the desktop installs (for KDE, it once was Ark), and MacOS
also delivers ZIP out of the box.
For ZIP, there are even built-in PHP functions to handle it.
7zip is, though open source, requiring third-party plugins, both for
the OS and servers, and 7zip is not really widespread. RAR and ZIP are
the dominant formats in cross-platform data exchange.
There is console version, which might be executed at server side to get
contents of archive or to analyze it
http://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/
MediaWiki already relies on running external executables such as convert
(ImageMagik) and texvc. I should admit that using ImageMagik for image
resamping is faster, takes less RAM and gives better results than PHP
built-in image handling modules (although ImageMagik should also be
available as PHP module, however not everywhere and increases footprint
a little bit).
Dmitriy