tar compression is now integrated into Windows as standard. It makes sense therefore to use it when making iconsets, Changing the .tar extension to .dis will create an invalid iconset. Are there plans to change this?
No, no plans in that direction.
Why? What advantages would be gained from using tar for icon sets?
For instance, sharing a script that uses 7-zip when not everyone has 7-zip installed.
Is there a way of using DO inbuilt zipper from an MS-DOS script?
I’m lost here. What’s this got to do with using tar for icon sets?
Re working an MS-DOS script for making DO iconsets which needs an absolute path to 7-zip, just calling tar would be much easier and people who do not have 7-zip installed can use it as well.
Zip is also built into Windows. Using Tar for this would be a little ridiculous, to be honest, especially just to make a DOS script easier. And it would break compatibility with old versions of Opus. Just use zip.
You could convert the DOS batch file to an Opus button or script if the problem is you need a command-line zip tool and Windows doesn't have one.
It is a DO MS-DOS script button.
here is the line that deals with making the .dis and the tar equivalent remmed out (as the .dis is not usable.)
"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip %zipname% {$name}-small.png {$name}-large.png {$name}.xml >NUL
rem tar -cvf %zipname% {$name}-small.png {$name}-large.png {$name}.xml
as you can see no absolute path is needed now (that it is inbuilt into Windows) for tar which makes it better IMO.
So it runs from/within Opus?
Just use Opus's built-in archive support in that case.
You don't need external tools for this at all, and we don't need to break the dis format for all existing users just so you can add three files to an archive and rename the extension.
Another thing to note: You can work on icon sets uncompressed. Just put the contents of the archive directly into the Icons folder and they'll work the same as if they were in a .dis file.
So there is no need to create the actual .dis file very often. If you're having to automate that final step that's only needed before sharing the finished result, you may just be creating extra work for yourself.