I think -D was important here, so this might break the logic.

7z doesn't seem to have an equivalent of -D. According to zip's command line help:

 -D   do not add directory entries

The only difference I can notice between 2 ZIP archives created (one with -D, one without -D) is that the former will have directory entries in its 7z l listing, but the latter will specify full paths to every file.

In practice, this appears to make no concrete difference on what you see when opening the ZIP archive: both have the exact same folder structure when viewed with GUI archive managers. In short, -D does not make the ZIP's structure flat or remove the top-level folder as the option's name might suggest. The only real difference it seems to make is that it prevents empty folders from being added to the archive.

I think the -D requirement is a leftover from early Godot 3.x days where Godot behaved poorly if given a TPZ that had directory entries. I've created TPZ files without -D for a while for my custom builds and it worked just fine (before I switched to 7z).

#!/usr/bin/env bash

mkdir -p example/{folder1,folder2,empty_folder}
touch example/{folder1,folder2}/example.txt

echo -e "\n\n================ Creating archives ================"
zip -r example.zip example
zip -r example-flat.zip example/*
zip -r -D example-D.zip example
zip -r -D example-D-flat.zip example/*
7z a example-7z.zip example
7z a example-7z-flat.zip example/*

echo -e "\n\n================ File contents created by zip ================"
7z l example.zip
7z l example-flat.zip
7z l example-D.zip
7z l example-D-flat.zip

echo -e "\n\n================ File contents created by 7z ================"
7z l example-7z.zip
7z l example-7z-flat.zip

For the record, in the asset library I had to fix some bugs related to directory entries missing. Not sure if the export template installer handles it any better.

Also needs -D equivalent.

So this bit forces me to have 7zip installed on macOS, which is less trivial than on Linux.

It seems available on homebrew but homebrew isn't set up on HP's Mac, could likely install it.

But this begs the question of whether there's anything more actively maintained than 7zip to compress zips. The last release dates back to 2016.

But this begs the question of whether there's anything more actively maintained than 7zip to compress zips. The last release dates back to 2016.

The last GUI release was made in June 2023: https://7-zip.org/
However, the CLI version was never updated past 16.02 (May 2016). This is an unfortunate artifact of 7-zip being developed around its Windows GUI first, and also being developed behind closed doors.

I don't know of any alternatives that have the same level of efficiency and performance for compressing ZIP archives. Using Zopfli to create a ZIP archive will result in slightly more efficiency, but it's more than 10× slower which makes it not worth the time. zip -9 is slightly better than the default option, but still not as good as 7z a -mx9.

The last GUI release was made in June 2023: 7-zip.org

It's Windows only though, no?

I found PeaZip which seems actively maintained and properly cross-platform: https://github.com/peazip/PeaZip/releases/

Might be worth comparing with 7zip.

But this begs the question of whether there's anything more actively maintained than 7zip to compress zips. The last release dates back to 2016.

At least in macOS homebrew, there are two 7Z packages:

• p7zip - 7z executable, built from p7zip port source from 2017 (17.04).
• sevenzip - 7zz executable, built from official 2023 source (23.01, same as GUI version).

Seems like official source added support for Linux/macOS command line build in 2021.

Edit: Debian seems to use the same naming, so it should be standard - https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/7zip/7zz.1.en.html