Joe Koberg wrote:

> If you use open source software and open file formats, this can't
> happen.  ZIP, as well as SVN and Git repos (not to mention ODF and
> PDF) are such formats.

Be careful about ZIP.

FOSS implementations of ZIP such as Info-zip stick to documented, freely
available formats.  But many commercial Windows implementations use
proprietary compression algorithms.  You can take perfectly portable C
code and lock it up in a ZIP archive never to be seen again.

ZIP is one of those container files, although it appeared before that name
became common.  There are dozens of possible compression algorithms in a
ZIP file, only some of which are documented.

--McD


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