After 5 Years there's a new 7zip non-beta release | Hacker News Reader

After 5 Years there's a new 7zip non-beta release

7-zip.org

107 pointsstarquake66 comments

To anyone reading this: please don't use “alpha” and “beta” status as an excuse for not releasing source code, not updating documentation, and not making clear distinction between stable-beta, beta-beta, and soon-to-be-reverted-beta features for _months_. Thank you.

For some time, it was a bit of pain in the ass to figure out 7zip status as it required collecting pieces of knowledge from multiple SourceForge forum threads.

7zip has strong encryption built in. I found it to be the only very useful x-platform (using Keka on OSX) option when you non-power-users to encrypt some files with a passphrase (symmetric encryption).

And it's opensource.

Is <archiver of choice> + GPG really a big deal?

I find that only helps if you know anyone who uses gpg.

there are literally dozens of us. dozens!

I honestly cannot ask non-power-users to go GPG...

And why the extra step? Just a readily available, opensource archiver --7zip-- does the trick with simple symmetric encryption by passphrase.

The changelog is sparse, but Igor has some comments on the release on Sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/6c...

Why are they still using sourceforge?

There's a bunch of stuff still on SF.

It's an un-met need for file hosting, support forums, and dev forums.

Probably because it works, they have been using it in the past, and there is no reason to move off of it.

Until "sf-editor" comes around and hijacks their project... http://www.itworld.com/article/2927973/linux/is-sourceforge-...

SF is on life-support, it survives only thanks to shady tactics like this and "repackaging" popular installers with adware. If you have a project on SF and don't like github, move to Bitbucket or some other provider but please please move off SF for good.

Tell the author of nmap that! And all the people who've left for github.

> 7-Zip now can extract ext3 and ext4 (Linux file system) images.

> 7-Zip now can extract ext2 and multivolume VMDK images.

> 7-Zip now can extract GPT images and single file QCOW2, VMDK, VDI images.

These are seriously impressive features! I hope someone will build on top of them to improve ext4 support in Windows.

The ability to extract files from VM images without actually firing up a VM or using other convoluted tools is also going to be very useful to me.

> I hope someone will build on top of them to improve ext4 support in Windows.

Is not better to just improve this already working Windows driver: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/ ?

Unless it can deal with snapshots, it's not particularly useful... but if it could, it would absolutely be yet-another-killer-feature for the gem that is 7zip.

Looking at the changelog, I was amazed at how many disk-image formats 7zip supported and I newer knew. Especially the amount added recent months seemed impressive.

So I checked my current version... And Ubuntu 16.10 ships version 9.20, which is from 2010.

Yay.

Edit: On further inspection, downloading the source from sourceforge and building it locally was a matter of minutes though. But that feels so utterly un-Ubuntu-ish.

You mean "Ubuntu 15.10", I guess? I'm really tired of having to add dozens of PPAs in order to have a sane up-to-date Ubuntu environment. I can understand core packages, which are mostly on the server side to be conservative, but packages like 7zip and others should be updated more frequently.

On the one hand I feel Arch is trying to redefine some kind of OS X-inspired "chic 1337" and is throwing UNIX history out the window to do so, and on the other hand the feedback cycle with Gentoo is slow enough I fear I'll constantly vacillate between "gah, just let it rebuild overnight" and "GAH THIS TIME MY FINGERS DON'T LEAVE ^C".

What else is there that's sanely up-to-date out-of-the-box, doesn't have bizarre redistribution issues (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10613518), and would appeal to someone who uses Slackware but wouldn't mind dependency resolution?

I was already recommended FreeBSD and that's on the todo list.

Have you tried NixOS?

I run the unstable channel, which is updated quite often.

Don't be scared of the name "unstable", because it's really quite stable since the channel only updates when all tests pass. Also, it's trivial to go back to a previous configuration if the current one is broken (which is something that has practically never happened to me).

I've observed NixOS from a distance with a modicum of curiosity and promptly filed it away as an awesome server OS (due to the networking infrastructure, coming with a remote management system OOB, the perfect reproducibility, etc), but it looks like I'll need to take a proper look at it as a desktop OS too.

The biggest hurdle I've had with NixOS in practice, on real iron, on a real machine (not just in a VM) is that there's just no way to "cheat".

NixOS is different, everything is based on the Nix language, and if you discover that something you need isn't in the package-store, the only way to get it onto your system is by leveraging Nix to build the package for you.

Basically the only way to get software to work on NixOS is by learning the Nix language and becoming a NixOS packager.

That is: With NixOS you cannot just wget a tarball, ./configure and make if something you need is missing.

This is probably a very intended "viral" design to boost the package-store, but it's also a hindrance for those who cannot put in the time and investment required to fully learn Nix.

For me, it meant getting my laptop on NixOS was something I wouldn't be able to accomplish over a full weekend, and because of that it became a non-option.

If those constraints don't apply to you, more power to you :)

Actually, that is not true at all, I don't know why you're saying that.

It's quite easy to set up a development environment with the build tools / dependencies you need: https://nixos.org/wiki/Development_Environments

Then you can run ./configure; make; etc; at will.

Or if you prefer, you can install build tools / dependencies in your profile with "nix-env", like in any normal distribution (but I don't think this is recommended).

Why not use Debian Stretch (the current 'testing' release)?

Very good point; there's always Debian, and it's existed forever... ;P

I am always amazed 7zip hasn't supplanted WinRar and the Rar format.

RAR has some unique built-in characteristics like recovery record (useful when archiving on optical discs, or any other media which can degrade in time) and recovery volumes (which was a life-saver feature in the age of floppy disks).

Another major contributor is likely that with rar you can make a multi-file self-extractor. Seem to recall that before broadband and torrents, many a pirated game was released as a split rar .exe that could fit on floppies and was spread across numerous upload sites.

Dump them all in a dir, run the exe, and game on...

7z can't do the exe bit I don't think, but it can make split archives of arbitrary size (in bytes).

Providing executable packages is a terrible practice anyway and should be discouraged. It reinforces the view that it's OK to execute random untrusted programs just to get a document, the most popular assumption abused by malware developers.

I can't deny that that's true.

It's inconvenient too, as nothing in this house runs Windows right now, and extracting custom fancy EXEs* can get annoying.

(*: Most archivers can reopen the EXEs they create as par the course, and there are lots of extractors and unpackers out there, but I vaguely remember a few incidents where I wanted to extract an executable archive/installer of some kind and couldn't. In some cases pushing the EXE through Wine worked.)

I believe winzip had the same feature of creating a exe zip spanning over multiple files, for using on floppies.

I only remember using that feature when zipping something up myself and it would have you keep inserting floppies as needed. I'm sure you could then post images of the floppies for distribution but I never really saw that done. It was always .r00, .r01, etc on usenet.

True, though i think the making scheme of rar was more helpful. Also, rar compressed various file formats (video and audio specifically) better.

Just what I was going to ask about. I thought WinRAR had the option to include parity checks / redundancy within the data.

BTW, is there a current... "turnkey" (simple, "clicky"), I guess, *NIX solution for doing that within an archive?

There is this par2cmdline[1] tool which is (as the name suggests) a console program "for creating and using PAR2[2] files to detect damage in data files and repair them if necessary". GPar2[3] (alpha) is a simple GTK+ GUI for it.

[1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

[3] - https://github.com/Parchive/gpar2

If you want to build something like that, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/ras-1.03.tar.gz can provide the redundancy support.

Well, on my planet it has.

The 7zip program is much less nice-looking. And rar works.

This is because, on Windows, you can't double click a 7z file and have it open 7zip. If they fixed that, they'd have a winner.

If you have .7z files associated with 7z File Manager, it will open on double click. Is that not the default on installation?

You double click on the file and Windows shows two 7zip programs as an option.

If you choose the wrong one it will not work later.

And it will not repeat the dialog box with the options.

On HN you're probably expected to be able to change file associations when you don't like them.

It is the default. It's always worked for me just fine.

You are so lucky. I've installed on every Windows machine I've had for years and have never had it work out of the box. I've got to right-click a .7z and choose open with -> 7zip.

I'll take a look at my setup when I get home tonight.

You can change the associations in the program settings but you have to be in administrator mode, otherwise they don't stick. http://www.7-zip.org/faq.html

It doesn't associate on setup. You have to open 7zip, go to options and you see this http://i.imgur.com/12dpE7G.png

I usually click "Select all" then unselect ISO. Done.

Edit: other person replied it must be opened in Administrator mode. That explains why I didn't have it associated.

I haven't seen a RAR in ages.

You know people who use WinRAR?

I and everyone I know locally uses WinRAR, nobody uses 7zip.

Seems to be mostly Russians and warez scene kids still using winrar

What about Ukrainians?

In Russia RAR is still the default format :(

Have you ever downloaded a scene release?

You do realise you can decompress .rar using 7zip right?

But the scene releases are not using 7zip to create the rars, are they?

Among the movers and shakers in the scene, isn't there generally a predilection to use free software over non-free software? E.g. the only time I run across matroska contained movies is when it's released from the scene.

Not really. There's a general predilection for the best software available, especially since they're unconstrained by purchase costs. Often the free program is the best, but not always.

"Best software" - Are you joking? Scene releases use winrar mostly for packing and splitting. Usually null-compression is used.

Yeah it's usually an ISO within multiple RARs within multiple ZIPs. And this is when they don't act playful and use an obscure archive format that can only be extracted with a (paid or free but infected) closed source app.

Depending on the platform I'm using I have some code in bash, Powershell and C# to deal with this. Non coders must have a hard time !

Jdownloader automatically extracts archives, no fancy scripts needed.

From my observation, most downloads are rar format (95% at a guess), but it doesn't really matter if it's rar or 7z as the differences in resource usage are negligible.

The good news is that most archives support free extraction of both formats.

What formats are you referring to? o.o

It's bin a while since I encountered it, but I remember having to hunt for MagicISO or PowerISO to open several archives that I couldn't find anywhere else.

You don't!?

I don't. Feel free to read my reasoning here: http://www.7-zip.org/license.txt

They could try to replace the nonfree unrar code with the one from libarchive.

It's a pity they don't have a native OSX version. I'm aware that options exist like Keka, but I prefer the interface of 7zip.

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