[Development] Either remove or make QZip{Reader, Writer} official

[Scott Bloom]

-----Original Message-----
From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Thiago Macieira
Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2026 11:40
To: development at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Development] Either remove or make QZip{Reader, Writer} official

On Wednesday, 27 May 2026 10:39:10 Pacific Daylight Time Ville Voutilainen
wrote:
> Do you have a guesstimate on how far the existing code would be from 
> just being promoted as-is?

My feeling it's basically a rewrite from scratch, with security in mind and with far more usability. I simply don't trust the code that is there, because it wasn't written with that in mind, has an extremely limited unit test, and has not been the subject of fuzzing at all. We have never checked what features might be interesting either, so it does a minimum that was required.

Zip files aren't that complex, so it's not a huge amount of work. It also gets limited if one uses libarchive instead of attempting to write the parser from scratch and deal with the compression and uncompression.

The largest amount of time is probably going to be in writing unit tests (which libarchive can't help us with) and setting up the fuzzer.

--
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Principal Engineer - Intel DCG - Platform & Sys. Eng.
================
Please don’t remove it without a replacement 😉  I use it in several of my projects (Microsoft ***x formats that zip the data is a big one).

I would be willing to volunteer  to work on bringing it to Qt public quality.

Scott