From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-01-14T08:48:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Best way for platf. independent compression?

In article <20020113232557.GA1898@digikata.com>,
Alan Chen  <alan@digikata.com> wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 06:28:14AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
>> In article <20020113213008.A6449@prism.localnet>,
>> Massimiliano Mirra  <list@chromatic-harp.com> wrote:
>> >Currently, rpkg builds packets by tar'ring and gzip'ping the source
>> >directories through GNU tar.
>> >
>> >However it aims to be entirely Ruby-based or at least platform
>> >independent out of the box.  If you have any though or warning on the
>> >following subjects, I'd like to hear them:
>> >
>> >- is GNU tar a reasonable external requirement for this, i.e. is it
>> >easily available on every platform that Ruby runs on or even
>> >widespread enough that it is already installed?
>> 
>> Unfortunately, it's not gonna generally be available on Windows unless 
>> you've installed the Cygwin tools.  And since we're moving away from 
>> cygwin, you have to assume that people will not have installed tar on 
>> Windows.
>
>Actually many compression tools will open a gnu tar, win-zip for example
>happily works with tar.gz files.
>
Yes, but does it have a commandline interface?  

I just tend to think it's a good idea if we make the package manager pure 
Ruby so we dont' have any outside dependencies.  Speed is not an issue 
for this particular application.  How good does the compression have to be 
for this?  Speed isn't really an issue in this case either.

Phil