* Marco Schuster marco@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