Re: Press for Cygwin

[John Marshall <jmarshall@acm.org>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 04:06:36PM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Does anyone know how we can adapt the archives so that they are not WinZip
> readable?  Would just converting everything to .bz2 do that?

Amusingly enough, making the archive names self-identifying as
packages-for-use-with-Cygwin's-setup would solve this problem too.

For example (and this idea is the "better suggestion" I alluded to in
my previous email) if we substituted e.g. "cygwinpkg" for "tar" so that
a bunch of archives were called

	bash-2.05-6.cygwinpkg.gz
	bash-2.05-6-src.cygwinpkg.gz
	fileutils-4.1-1.cygwinpkg.bz2

then WinZip would ungzip the .gz ones but not realise there was a
tarball inside (because it looks for files ending in ".tar").

This is a little bit similar to Debian .deb packages.  If you use the
file command on a .deb package, it will tell you that it's just an ar
archive.  And ar and other tools do indeed work on .deb files.  But
they're ar archives with particular contents, for use with dpkg (or
whatever the tool is called), so the name tells you that.  Separation
of implementation and interface, and all that.

So even though tar still works on bash-2.05-6.cygwinpkg.gz and friends,
the name stops WinZip from seeing inside them, and emphasises that
they're special archives that work with setup.exe.

It seems to me that that's an understandable change to filename parsing.
But I'm still churning through the cygwin-developer mail archives in the
hope that I might be able to make intelligent comments one day. :-)

    John

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