BlackBox7: I think we shouldn't need to teach GOG's engineers how not to fuck things up. I am not an expert in any of these matters by a long shot, but I can easily follow everything that has been discussed here, and I frankly think it's embarrassing that they need to take suggestions from forum posters for basic things like circumventing browsers' file type detection.
I don't know; as a software developer myself for many decades now, it's not always
that easy. Very often, the "
best" solution is not the most elegant or the most "
technically correct" but it's the "
good enough" one.
The question most of the time is not "
is it the best way to do it ?" but more "
is it the most time efficient way to do it so that I can work on other things", if you have a solution that is good enough for 95% of the cases and takes one day to implement and on the other side another solution that 100% bullet proof, state of the art, but takes 5 days to implement, guess which one will be chosen most of the time ?
It has nothing to do with "incompetence" or or evil corporation tactics, it's just pragmatism, it's the kind of compromise most developers must do everyday. I could tell you many examples where I have personally to make such technically "bad/less optimal" decisions simply because it was the most "pragmatic" thing to do.
Maybe I am wrong here but I don't think Gowor made decision he made because he is not competent or because he didn't knew how to calculate a hash, or anything, (I suspect he probably already know most of the technical proposition made in this thread) but I think he did it because he considered it was an "acceptable" compromise, preventing "dumb" users from accidentally extracting a non working installation, making it slightly for peoples to add malware to the installer, while at the same time not impacting users. (i.e. users using the installers the way they were meant to be used). As he said he has a lot on his plate, so I guess making sure that Linux users were still able to use a third party tool to extract the installer's files was probably not very high in his list of priorities when he developed the new installers..