Should scene.org still rewrite .zip files?
category: general [glöplog]
For as long as I've been using it, scene.org has been rewriting .zip files uploaded to add a small ASCII art logo and some text, and put that as the zip comment. I assume that this is a holdover from (or perhaps an homage to) BBSes, which used to do this as a form of advertising (you can still see this in e.g. some torrents, I believe).
However, scene.org doesn't really need that advertising anymore; BBSes are no more, and pretty much everyone who would ever want to upload a demo somewhere these days will know about it. And as the world has progressed, we have seen a shift towards caring much more about maintaining the integrity of data (witness e.g. HTTPS everywhere, or subresource integrity for JavaScript). As an author, I've always found it a bit icky that scene.org goes in and modifies my release, if only slightly (I believe it doesn't e.g. repack, at least not in the common case).
Having a text file in there is also practically annoying; it breaks deduplication (a question such as “is scene.org's version the same as the compo version or the final version?” now requires much more logic to figure out; you can't just compare files anymore), it breaks heuristics to figure out whether to ignore or keep a top-level subdirectory when unpacking, and it feels very half-baked: It only works for .zip files, not .rar, .tar.gz, .mp3 (which can also carry comments), .mp4 or really whatever.
Perhaps, as scene.org nears its 30th birthday, we can decide that this rewrite no longer is expedient, and stop doing it for new uploads? (I wouldn't want to go in and remove them from old files; two wrongs don't make a right.)
However, scene.org doesn't really need that advertising anymore; BBSes are no more, and pretty much everyone who would ever want to upload a demo somewhere these days will know about it. And as the world has progressed, we have seen a shift towards caring much more about maintaining the integrity of data (witness e.g. HTTPS everywhere, or subresource integrity for JavaScript). As an author, I've always found it a bit icky that scene.org goes in and modifies my release, if only slightly (I believe it doesn't e.g. repack, at least not in the common case).
Having a text file in there is also practically annoying; it breaks deduplication (a question such as “is scene.org's version the same as the compo version or the final version?” now requires much more logic to figure out; you can't just compare files anymore), it breaks heuristics to figure out whether to ignore or keep a top-level subdirectory when unpacking, and it feels very half-baked: It only works for .zip files, not .rar, .tar.gz, .mp3 (which can also carry comments), .mp4 or really whatever.
Perhaps, as scene.org nears its 30th birthday, we can decide that this rewrite no longer is expedient, and stop doing it for new uploads? (I wouldn't want to go in and remove them from old files; two wrongs don't make a right.)
Quote:
Should scene.org still rewrite .zip files?
No.
For all the reasons you mentioned.
To be fair, most of the files I've uploaded in recent years did not get nfo's inserted, or at least I did not notice that happening. But making it a policy not to modify archives any more than strictly necessary seems the logical way to move forward nonetheless.
