On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 09:48 -0700, Isaac Jones wrote:
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?
Tar is easy to code, gzip is harder. Ian wrote some gunzip code in pure Haskell but I don't think there is a pure gzip Haskell compressor anywhere. I wrote some bindings to zlib, but then that needs the zlib C library of course. I don't think it's that over the top. If we intend to use .tar.gz as the cabal-install distribution format then windows users need to be able to decompress that. We could use some other format for which there is already a decompressor bundled with windows, eg .cab format. However generating that on non-windows machines is not easy. cabal-install is already one binary we'd be distributing, it's not that hard to bundle either zlib.dll or gzip.exe or tar.exe.
We could just not compress things, I guess, if it's pretty common to have this older version of tar.
As Neil said, Windows users don't have tar/gzip at all. Duncan