Morpho

What the format should the backup file be? tar.gz or zip?

I prefer to tar.gz since zip has a file size limitation. However, i am wondering if window user (typical user of morpho) like this format or not. Do you have any comment?

GZipped TAR archives are good because of the size limitation, though the limit isn't present in more recent implementations of Zip (ZIP64). However, neither java.util.zip nor Windows XP's default archive tool can work with ZIP64, leaving the 4GB limit. The two drawbacks to .tar.gz is that Windows folks won't have a default decompressor, and they usually don't understand the idea of archiving vs. compressing, so when they extract the .gz, they expect the directory structure instead of 'just a file'.

As an alternative, could you have a 'restore Morpho 1.6.1' button or something similar that automatically does the restoration? This way you don't have to rely on the user doing the correct steps to restore the backup, but I'm not sure how much work this'd be and if it'd be worth it for this relatively infrequently used feature.

I htink you should use whichever format gives you the most reliable archive -- so it sounds like tar.gz given file size issues. Then the decompression/restore would be an exercise for the reader, and would essentially be a support issue we would handle on a case-by-case basis for now. Downgrading to 1.6.1 should be exceedingly rare -- this is just a safety measure.

So I used tar.gz format for the backup file. In windows, I can user Winzip to the backup file.

Here are some notes:

1. I add a property in config.xml to control if morpho need to backup file.
2. Backup only happens when user first time starts morpho after installing a new version.
3. Backup file would not include previous version .tar.gz files in .morpho dir.
4.I added a progress status bar to indicate the backup processing. In case user may think morpho is hang if the backup takes a long time.

I test in linux, mac and windows, they worked well.

move to 1.7

Original Bugzilla ID was 4032