Really? So the unpacked version, that Galaxy downloads, doesn't need any extra space? Beside, compressed tarballs usually take less space then zip files.

I know. Zip and unzip usually arent't part of the installation media. They have to be installed. In contrary tar is - and even if you have some obscure version without gzip support - guess what, gzip is also another standard tool. And don't forget: there are more OS's than Windows, MacOSX and Linux.

Seriously? AMD's script is an incredible mess. Just have a look at it's code. It barely works on supported distributions.

Are they uncompressed? Also, that's Windows.

I didn't realize that they were using regular zip rather than gzip. If you look at the script, it's pretty strongly implied that they're using tar.

Yes, seriously. I've never had any problems with it other than trying to remember which package I want it to build.

In fact, the only problems I've had with their drivers are the drivers themselves. Being able to remove them via the same software that I use to manage other bits of software is actually kind of nice.

dunno, they clearly deliberately changed the --help message to not display the usual commandline options. So I would assume that they know that those don't work in their modfied version.
You might very well argume whether it those modification were stricly necessary (I don't really know what exactly was changed there), but I don't think a lack of testing is the issue here.

the only argument you could make is that they should properly disable those internal commands, not just don't advertise them ;)

Yes, it does matter. There's one copy for Windows, one copy for OSX and there's one copy for Linux as well.

And yes, it's apparently a zip, but if you look at the fucking code, there's instances of tar in there.

3. I'm not really sure what this has to do with any of my points. I happen to like the ability to take one file and turn it into the appropriate package. Whether it barely works or not, the fact is that it does tend to work. And there's no particular reason why it has to barely work.

As long as we have the option of unpacking them manually (at our own risk) without installing I'm ok with this change. I'll miss the tarballs sure, and it's going to be a pain redownloading them all but I do understand where GOG is coming at.

Not every Linux user is tech savvy and sometimes rights holders require a form of EULA acceptance regardless if everyone scrolls down to the accept button or not. I believe the Lucas Arts games were the first ones to require this on GOG for Linux.

Yes, but if that's the case, then why not just remove it completely? The options are there in the file and likely to be stumbled upon by people that are used to having these sorts of installers, so I'm not sure what removing that message really accomplishes other than preventing newbs from stumbling on that.

I support this change, will try it out soon. :)

I confirm we can do it.
My first prototype of conversion script 'MojoSetup .sh' -> 'Debian & derivatives .deb' is already online ;)

It is really great to see differential patches as it really is quite annoying to download multi-gigabyte files for some small upgrades. However, with that said, it would also be nice to have tar archives after all as they are a really convenient way of moving installations around my computer (I sometimes move lesser-played, large games to external storage, I don't know how this will behave with installers).
Also, it would be really nice to have some way of checking the integrity of the files we have downloaded - could you just provide a secure hash (such as SHA256) at the download page?

i so hope that someday the rights holder will understand how meaningless the whole "accept the license at installation"-concept is *sigh*.

i don't think we have to worry too much about the people who's first step is to read the shell script. They are smart enough to figure things out. ;) And everybody should have the common sense that an undocumented option might be trouble.

I mean, I agree that it would be nice to remove it, if it doesn't work. But i don't think it is a huge issue.

I can confirm it too. But there's the drawback/annoyance that the .sh file is not purely a zipfile so the TAB key doesn't autocomplete the file name and you've got to copy-paste it (or type it by hand :S).

Plus, when manually extracting the game from the installer script you've got to create the target directory yourself (whereas before it was included in the tarball). And to cap it all, you won't get the desired files directly in that directory, but two levels down in the data/noarch directories that wil get extracted from the installer.

So to me this change means going several steps back in user-friendliness and, above all:

Way to do it, forcing us to use these new installers...

hooray, thingies! hooray!

I'm probably not going to use them much as intended, but I still really like this approach. It's been used a lot elsewhere.

Easy enough to install the intended way, doesn't require root privileges, doesn't risk screwing up package management, and is fairly straight-forward to just circumvent altogether and extract like a tar archive if that's your thing. And I know it is mine.

I only hope they ship both the 32-bit and the 64-bit executables in a single download, whenever applicable.

That's what they're doing at the present. You just wouldn't know it as it's hidden from the user.

I don't particularly care for the extra bloat in the installer, but I suppose it's probably relatively minor as the assets are what takes up most of the room anyways.