From: Stefan Lang <langstefan@...>
Date: 2005-07-12T02:24:11+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Rant 0.4.0

On Monday 11 July 2005 18:32, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On 7/10/05, Stefan Lang <langstefan@gmx.at> wrote:
> > Rant comes with parts of Mauricio Fernandez and Austin Ziegler's
> > archive-tar-minitar to create (gzipped) tar archives on platforms
> > where no tar command is available.
>
> I'm curious as to why you chose to import parts of the code rather
> than making it a dependency?

Actually, I thought long about this before I decided to import
the code. There are mainly two reasons:

First, rant-import allows you to create a build script, tailored
to the needs of your project, that can be used instead of an
rant installation and depends only on a standard ruby installation:
	% rant-import --auto make.rb
Now, make.rb contains exactly the code needed to build/install
the software package. That would have been harder to implement
if minitar were a dependency.

The second reason is that probably many users don't use the
packaging/archiving features or have the tar/zip commands anyway.
=> It wouldn't make sense to force them to install minitar and rubyzip
and so all packaging code would have to check if there is any
chance to create a tar/zip archive.

I've made to many bad experiences with package managers and building
and installing software in the past. I want to keep building with
Rant simple and hassle free.

> FWIW, I never use tar anymore in generating my distributions, as the
> only major features that ardchive-tar-minitar is missing is symlink
> support (it's missing more than that, but the symlink support is the
> only one that's really important for a distribution purpose).

Yes, symlink support would be great. You don't intend to implement
it for archive-tar-minitar? Would it be much work? I'd do it if
only I knew more about the format of tar archives.

-- 
Stefan