Adam Borowski - 20.10.18, 22:54:
> * zip is used by Windows folks only, similar to gzip.

It is also used by LibreOffice (or under-maintained OpenOffice).

[…]
> * 7z is similar but incompatible to xz; also a container rather than a
> pure compressor.

There can be benefits of container compressors like zip and 7z:

Tar comes from Tape Archiver. It works sequential. So to dig out just
one file it has to read over all the archive until that file comes.

Zip instead has the contents directory at a central place, as far as I
vaguely remember at the end of the file. That is one of the reasons
OpenOffice developers back then chose it.

Well of course there are other containers as well like dar for disk
archiver.

There is a crazy amount of tools in that area. I benchmarked some of
them quite some time ago¹.

[1] outdated, I wrote a Linux User article about those quite some time
ago, the packbench program may still work tough and could be enhanced,
adapted to support newer stuff:
https://martin-steigerwald.de/computer/programme/packbench/index.html

And yeah, I know Gitorius is gone and I intend to upload everything to
Gitlab at some time.

--
Martin