On 01/02/2013 02:58 AM, Daniel Herring wrote: > On Tue, 1 Jan 2013, Stefano Lattarini wrote: > >> OTOH, what about distribution "tarballs" in '.zip' format? They don't >> use tar at all ... Time to deprecate them maybe? Is anybody actually >> using them? And while at it, what about the even more obscure 'shar' >> format? > > While I haven't manipulated a shar file in years, but zip is still > the dominant archive format on MS platforms. > While this is absolutely true, my point is that it's not a format truly used or required for distribution tarballs. If you are going to compile an Automake-based package from source on MS Windows, you'll need either MinGW/MSYS or Cygwin, and AFAICS both those environment comes with working tar and gzip programs.
Or is there something that I'm missing? > It is quite common (and a good practice) for a project to distribute > \n newlines in a tarball and \r\n newlines in a zip archive. > But the Automake "dist-*" recipes don't do this, so you'd need to roll your own rule if you want to support this use case (such a rule could of course leverage on the "distdir" Automake rule to do much of the work). Regards, Stefano
