GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 770861
Don't offer to create .7z archives
Last modified: 2021-06-18 15:47:43 UTC
Nautilus 3.21.91's new integrated "Create Archive" feature offers to compress to just 3 formats: .zip, .tar.xz and .7z. I think the main reason why some people asked for easy .7z support was because .7z supports password protection. However, Nautilus 3.22's integrated compression does not support using passwords. A major disadvantage of including .7z is that Ubuntu does not include 7zip support by default and this feature will need to be patched out. For more about why Ubuntu doesn't include this by default, see https://launchpad.net/bugs/1254798 (You can ignore the part about wxgtk2.8 since that's no longer a dependency in the Debian/Ubuntu p7zip packaging). Other points ------------ On Linux, the tar.xz support is now very familiar. On Windows, the .7z format is more well-known (outside the open source community at least). However, it was pointed out that to use .7z on Windows, you'd have to download the 7-Zip app. The 7-Zip app supports .tar.xz. The 7-Zip app by default does not associate itself with any file formats; you can do this by going into Tools>Options and clicking the different formats you want 7-Zip to be the default handler for. One disadvantage of the .tar.* formats is that it takes one extra step for 7-Zip to decompress. foo.tar.xz > foo.tar > foo (I'm sure 7-Zip could be smarter here…) I think it would be possible for an extended .tar.xz format to support password protection. See for instance https://superuser.com/questions/162624/how-to-password-protect-gzip-files-on-the-command-line Once this format is finalized, it would need to be implemented at least in the 7-Zip app too for easy sharing to Windows. Conclusion ---------- I'm not sure there's sufficient benefit to include both .tar.xz and .7z in the "Create Archive" dialog. Forcing users to decide which is better when the difference between them is so small is the "too much choice" problem. It's much easier to explain how .zip and .tar.xz differ than it is to explain that .tar.xz supports Unix file permissions but .7z is more "familiar" to Windows users. Further, Ubuntu can't support .7z now. I propose removing native .7z compression support from Nautius 3.22.
Password compression is planed for next release, then this will make more sense to include 7zip I think. In any case, it's not going away for 3.22, we are in UI freeze and very late on the cycle. I understand you had no other option for testing, we delivered this work in the edge for UI freeze, but it's not critical to ask for a UI freeze exception I believe.
Actually, in my testing, it looks like Nautilus 3.22 can create and extract 7z without needing to have p7zip installed.
(In reply to Jeremy Bicha from comment #2) > Actually, in my testing, it looks like Nautilus 3.22 can create and extract > 7z without needing to have p7zip installed. It uses libarchive, but I believe libarchive would need the 7zip backend for it and therefore p7zip. I will double check that.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Files (nautilus), then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.