Is ACE compression still in use?

[ZipGenius]

While we are working to finalize ZipGenius 6.4 release, we discuss about compression formats that got a large success in the past and then they quickly got abandoned.

A lot of people remembers when ACE compression was one of the biggest competitor for ZIP and RAR: it had great compression ratio and operating speed, but it had a big downside. It was not free or open source. Neither RAR is but it's still alive and kicking and people still uses with satisfaction. So what happened to ACE compression format? Simple answer: it's not developed anymore. WinACE, the utility that had full control over this compression format, seems to be abandoned and - also - the UNACEV2.dll version available is just the same we got back in 2005.

Clearly, ACE development stopped before the introduction of new features in the development tools we use and one very important feature is Unicode, which allows applications to handle filenames and texts with non-latin characters (like Japanese). This means that actually we couldn't provide a ZipGenius release that is fully compliant to Unicode if we leave ACE routine in our software: ZipGenius would have a partial support to Unicode but it would be excused because the original ACE utilities also don't support it.

We are continuously discussing whether to leave ACE support "as is" or to remove it. We acknolwedge that many users still have ACE archives somewhere, but we also consider that a large number of compressed formats grew up. Currently we have the know-how of handling files like: WMI, VHD, BH, RPM, DEB and many many more.

The same fate could also hit other old formats like ZOO, ARJ, ARC and YZ1 because they are not as much used as they were almost 15 years ago.

What are your thoughts about? Would you discuss it at ZipGenius Forum?

[eagleman]

Partially I agree with you.

The ACE format is too old and unsupported. Just consider that the latest version of Winace is the 2.69 released on the 26th Of February 2008.

The RAR format, instead, can be considered to be continously added and updated into Zipgenius simply because the latest version of Winrar has been released on the 16th of March 2010, and the UNRAR plugin will be updated consequentially too.

In other words, you can say goodbye forever to ACE support into Zipgenius without any regret, but if someone has problem with this format and needs to extract any files of this kind you can consider to add the ACE format support with a separate plug-in not available by default into the installation package of Zipgenius but downloadable with a minisetup program from the Zipgenius website.

What do you think about this idea?

Modificato October 15, 2010 da eagleman

[frman]

I think it's better to develop the new version of ZG without the support of the ACE files, because is better to include and improve only the fully working functionality.

The eagleman idea could be adopted (if it isn't too expansive from a developing point of view) in order to let users of .ace files to manage. However, I think this plugin could be very hard to be codified, because it have not to use the Unicode format, so you need to rewrite some functions only for this format of compression.

You should valutate on the time needed and the difficulty of have some different function and variables for that format, and, overall, if the module is compatible with the rest of the main program ZipGenius.

Personally, I never used .ACE archive in the last years.