by Ken Task.
'widely supported' .... hmmmmm ....
Mac purist would disagree, but for all practical purposes, your operating system is very closely related to Linux. Mac's should be able to handle tar.gz's natively. Also, the end of line characters of ALL php files contained in the package that makes up Moodle should be 100% compat with Mac in the .tar.gz.
Yes, you could use the zip, but why would you want to?
2 cents, of course, 'spirit of sharing', Ken