From: Alan Chen Date: 2002-01-14T10:59:46+09:00 Subject: Re: Best way for platf. independent compression? On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 08:48:25AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote: > In article <20020113232557.GA1898@digikata.com>, > Alan Chen wrote: > >On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 06:28:14AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote: > >> In article <20020113213008.A6449@prism.localnet>, > >> Massimiliano Mirra 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? Actually, yes. > 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 Agreed. But, I also think that using some existing compression file format would be advisable. -- Alan Chen Digikata LLC http://digikata.com