Abdulaziz Ghuloum <[email protected]> writes: > On Aug 14, 2009, at 4:32 AM, Andreas Rottmann wrote: > >>> I honestly don't know all the pros and cons of zip vs tar.gz files. >>> Do you know when one would choose one over the other? >>> >> I'm no expert on this topic, but I think two of the relevant >> differences are: >> >> - Zip has better tool support on Windows, while compressed tarballs >> are more common on UNIX/POSIX platforms. IMHO, we shouldn't care >> about Windows in that regard, since while there may be something like >> WinZip on many (or even most) Windows machines, we can't rely on >> that, and need something with a standardized command-line interface >> anyway. OTOH, on GNU/Linux you can pretty much rely on tar and gzip >> being present, and bzip2 is commonly installed as well (if not it's >> just an "$PKG_MANAGER install" away :-). > > 1. On linux, there's no problem using either zip or tgz or whatever. > On windows, zip files are well supported (there is always the free > zip/unzip tools from info-zip.org that work on all platforms and is > well supported). > > 2. The different Unixes have incompatible "tar" utilities (there are > at least 3 flavors: gnu, bsd, and solaris, and I don't know what you'd > get under windows). > > 3. We can choose to interface directly with libzip to do whatever we > need to do. tgz files, being two-layer, are harder to process in > place. > > I think we should go with zip files as I see no problem with it. > Agreed. The only thing that would have made allowing tarballs desirable would have release tarballs double as packages. My impression ATM is that we're gravitating towards a system that does (optional) re-arrangement when building the package. The system would (perhaps) also allow this re-arrangement to happen at install time, at which point we could support a BSD-ports-like[0] mode of operation, allowing on-demand fetching of pristine source code releases (or VCS systems).
I think both ways of operation have advantages: ready-built packages are more suited to the needs of somebody who just wants to install an app that happens to be implemented in Scheme, while fetching soure from VCS systems is nice for people who like to live on the bleeding edge. I think this is also what Eduardo had in mind with his "epcot"[1]. [0] http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html [1] http://groups.google.com/group/ikarus-users/msg/f5293a27baedf5ff Rotty -- Andreas Rottmann -- <http://rotty.yi.org/>
