[Otakar Smrz] Cabal's `sdist` on Win32

[Isaac Jones]

Bringing Otakar back in on the discussion.

Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 23:15 +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> > -- line 133 replaced with these two system calls
>> >
>> >    system $ unwords ["tar -C", tmpDir, "-cf",
>> >                                 tarBallFilePath, nameVersion pkg_descr]
>> >    system $ unwords ["gzip -9", tarBallFilePath]
>
> So the version of tar there is too old to understand the -z flag?
>
>> What was the original line here? And why are tar and gzip being used,
>> when a much more "windows" thing to do would be to create a .zip file
>> - although I guess thats not what people want.
>
> We'd still need a .zip file reader.
>
> I would suggest we ship zlib.dll on windows, and not use external tar or
> gzip programs, but then of course we run into the problem that there's
> nowhere to put the .dll that will work (unless someone can figure out
> how to use isolated .dlls and manifests and all that).
>
> So perhaps including a recent tar prog (that understands -z) would be
> the way forward. We'd need this for cabal-install in future, it's not
> just sdist.

Do you mean just include it for windows?

Including tar with cabal seems a bit over the top... Is there a pure
Haskell tar or gzip or zip?

We could just not compress things, I guess, if it's pretty common to
have this older version of tar.

peace,

  isaac