Can't create sdist bundle

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk
Tue Nov 13 06:35:39 EST 2007


On Tue, 2007-11-13 at 10:23 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> > Well the simple solution is to change the version of tar.exe you've got
> > to one that does support gzip. I'm sure there must be one.
> 
> Any idea where I might find it? The words MingW or Cygwin will not be
> appreciated :-)

Google suggests:
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

> I have copies of tar and gzip that are Windows native versions, very
> handy, and could easily be distributed with Cabal on Windows. They
> come to 155Kb in total, so its not unreasonable to ship them.

We're just not set up for shipping binaries. We have no mechanisms for
it.

> > The right solution imho is to move the sdist feature into cabal-install
> > where it can depend on the tar and zlib packages.
> 
> What is the likely timeframe for this? If its more than a few weeks,
> then there should really be some way for Windows users to create Cabal
> packages before this. As a longer term goal, it does seem quite
> reasonable.

Depends on how much of a hacky solution you want. cabal-install already
works on windows and uses the zlib package. It already has code for
untaring packages. Adding an sdist command to cabal-install that calls
the Cabal lib prepareTree function to prepare the tar image and then
uses it's internal tar and zlib code to make the package doesn't sound
too hard.

So if there's someone who wants to have a go at that we can give
pointers.

When I have a moment to work on cabal-install I'd rather focus on
getting cabal-setup and cabal-install merged in a sane way. Their
command line handling is a bit of a mess at the moment.

Duncan



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