RE: Patches to java.util.zip by Christian Schlichtherle

[Jeroen Frijters]

Christian Schlichtherle wrote:
> the changes from int to long are required as to the ZIP file format
> specification available online from PKZIP Inc.
> 
> The specification says that all integers are 4 byte unsigned integers.
> Java's int type is 4 byte signed, thus the type long is 
> required to hold a ZIP file integer. You can find this in other
> popular Java based ZIP file implementations as well (Apache ant, the
> JDK, etc.).

Thanks for taking the time to explain this. We obviously should take in
these fixes.

> Furthermore, the constructors I've introduced are provided to allow an
> application developer to have the choice of choosing an encoding:
> UTF-8 as with Sun's JDK which is only relevant if you need to exchange

> ZIP files with JDK created ZIPs or CP437 to exchange ZIP files created
> by the rest of the world (PKZIP, Winzip, infozip, MS Explorer, etc).
> In my opinion, the latter is more relevant for real world
> internationalized applications.

Unfortunately, we cannot add additional public constructors, but I would
suggest adding a system property to control the encoding used by our zip
implementation. By default we should be compatible with the JDK, but
this would allow applications and/or users to override the encoding to
be compatible with the rest of the world.

Thanks again.

Regards,
Jeroen