Consider .tar.gz instead of .zip for releases

[nazar-pc]

Zip files can be opened on pretty much any OS with built-in software, while .tar.gz on Windows requires third-party software to be used and doesn't integrate as seamlessly into built-in file manager.

Even on Linux where there is likely stock software with .tar.gz support, it it still a bad choice since it doesn't allow efficient extraction of random files the same way Zip does.

Basically .tar.gz is almost never a great choice, so consider using .zip instead.

[anthonyvdotbe]

For the record, Windows 11 has built-in support for .tar.gz

Edit: PowerShell's Expand-Archive currently lacks support for it though, so switching to .zip would be helpful in this regard

[alixander]

I appreciate you raising this issue. Do you have examples of popular open-source packages that have used zip over tar? I am not familiar with the tradeoffs, so I'm just going to defer on what is most standard from bigger packages, and that seems to be tar.

https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v2.65.0
https://github.com/golang/mock/releases/tag/v1.6.0

[nazar-pc]

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/releases/tag/tauri-cli-v2.2.5 ships .tar.gz on Linux only, macOS and Windows are .zip.
The repo has 88.6k stars, so I think it clarifies as popular.

There are certainly examples of both approaches. Also .tar.gz is really slow on Windows, for example caching in GitHub Actions on Windows routinely takes much longer than on other platforms due to how slow their implementation of this format is. Not that it is a big issue for d2, but in general it contributes to the format being objectively quite bad and is only great for niche use cases.