Tim Abbott wrote: [...] > However, I think this is a good opportunity to discuss whether the merits > of the .spkg extension for Sage packages. Fundamentally, we're using a > nonstandard extension for a standard file type. This breaks various tools > that try to infer file types from extensions (the most common nuisance for > me is bash's tab completion of "tar -xf").
Many months ago, I downloaded Sage for the first time. After unpacking it and looked into its directory tree, I was rather confused by that strange ".spkg" extension that Sage uses to pack stuff. Of course, the file command was available and in no time I realized that those packages were packed using bzip2. Yes, I agree with you that we're using a non-standard extension for a standard file type. By the way, perhaps it's non-standard because it hasn't been specified in some official standard document by a standards body? Take the case of OpenOffice.org and its file extensions, for example. The extension of files produced by OO writer is usually ".odt", but such files are just gzip'ed files. It's easy to uncompress files with the ".odt" extension produced by OO writer. However, the caveat is that _that_ extension has been documented in some official document. Please correct me if I'm wrong. > So, I'd like to get people's opinions on moving to standard .tar.bz2 > extensions for spkg archives. +1 My reason: less confusion on the part of those who look at the Sage packages for the first time --- please see my comment above in this post. > If people think it's a good idea in principle, I'll work on generating a > patch for gracefully handling the transition without e.g. making everyone > rebuild every package in their extant sage trees (which I suspect is the > largest practical concern). Yep, in principle moving to the ".tar.bz2" extension is a good idea. But I know next to nothing as to whether it would adversely affect the development of Sage later down the track. For instance, how feasible is it to implement this change? Would the migration break stuff? Just my random rants. -- Regards Minh Van Nguyen Web: http://nguyenminh2.googlepages.com Blog: http://mvngu.wordpress.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
