Some months back, I was playing around with software I had written to automatically decompress World of Warcraft addons, record their contents, and place them in a single zipped archive for download via our guild site. I ran into some peculiar issues with a handful of WoWAce-based addons that I eventually traced to the developer’s use (incorrectly, I might add) of Subversion externals. Oddly, the archive would behave correctly under Windows while using both the built-in Windows zip utility and 7-zip. That was when I started thinking about the blessing and curse of standards. Read more…