On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Robert Bradshaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > \On Oct 27, 2008, at 9:41 PM, Tim Abbott wrote: > >> On Oct 28, 12:31 am, "Mike Hansen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> Hi Tim, >>> >>> I assume that we would/should add some other marker to the >>> filename to >>> identify it as the Sage version of that package rather than the >>> vanilla upstream source. >> >> Yeah, that's an issue I probably should have mentioned in my original >> email. One solution to that would be to always include the appended >> p0 (or whatever) in the version number for Sage versions of packages. >> Another would be to use the extension .spkg.tar.bz2. > > It should be noted that that they are not *just* bzipped tar files, > there is also the requirement that they contain an spkg-install > script (and, ideally, spkg.txt, a mercurial repo, etc.) But there is > often confusion that they can be opened with standard tar tools > (though the same could be said of open office files being .zip with a > non-obvious extension).
I certainly wondered a lot about the question of this thread when I made up the spkg extension. The reason I chose to call them .spkg instead of .tar.bz2 is that: (1) as mentioned above, they have lots of extra structure beyond just being .tar.bz2 files (hence when you see an .spkg you know what it is for and should contain, which avoids a lot of confusion), (2) to help distinguish them from upstream sources (3) because they need not be compressed (they can also be just .tar) (4) there is precedent for this, e.g., openoffice's format, etc. Also, .deb files are "standard Unix ar archives that include two gzipped or bzipped tar archives: one that holds the control information and another that contains the data." Should .deb files be changed to be .ar files? I am strongly in favor of us putting a README.txt in the spkg/standard directory, which explains the spkg extension, etc. Minh above says "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." I bet that a big file called README.txt in that directory that immediately explains spkg's, would have cleared up your confusion in seconds. Anyway, I'm not firmly opposed in this email to the proposal to change to .tar.bz2. I'm only explaining why .spkg exists right now. -- William -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
