Why are your downloads available in two different formats?

Sirium.net generally provides files for download in two formats, with the following file extensions: .zip and .gz.

Files with the .zip extension have been compressed in the ZIP compression format, which is a very popular format that's mostly used by MS Windows users.

Files with the .gz^* extension have been compressed with Gzip, which is short for GNU Zip, a free software compression program commonly used on Unix and Linux based operating systems. Gzip uses a different compression method to Zip and tends to be more efficient.

It has been my experience that Gzip'd downloads (such as my XOOPS modules) tend to be nearly half the size; making downloads faster, and requiring less storage space for the end user.

The problem is that not all Windows file compression software supports GZip (and "tar" - more on this later), or people are generally not aware that their software does. As a result, files are also supplied in ZIP format.

So, the preferred file versions to download are ones compressed with Gzip (ending in .gz) as these will download faster, use less bandwidth (handy if you are on a "capped" connection) and take less hard drive space.

The most common Windows compression software programs, such as Winrar and Winzip also supports Tar and Gzip archived files. Please refer to their respective manuals for further information.

The contents of our files are identical; it's only the way they are compressed that is different.

^* Some files will have ?.tar? before the .gz extension. These are files that have had their contents wrapped up in a ?tarball?. The Tar (Tape ARchive) file format does not compress files, but is used to wrap a large number of files into one file.

Further information:
Zip
Gzip
Tar

This Q&A was found on sirium.net support : http://support.sirium.net/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=12