On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 2:34 PM, Karl Berry <k...@freefriends.org> wrote: > Please make gzip releases in some non-gzip/xz/lzip/bzip form, that is, > uncompressed or .zip. > > I and a colleague just had to waste time explaining to a user how to > download an old version available as .tar, compile it, and then use that > to install the new version. (No, evidently he had no binary. Whatever ...) > > It costs nothing to make the releases available in another format than > .tar.*z, so ... ok? .zip would probably be best, to placate the > Windows world, but anything would be better than nothing. --thanks, karl.
Hi Karl, It's a simple change that is likely to help more than a few, so here's the diff I'll soon push:
From 7d7e7971532a82d197075d27b63d9f54f2bddd82 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jim Meyering <meyer...@fb.com> Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2017 22:42:06 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] maint: also distribute a zip-compressed tarball * configure.ac (AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE): Add dist-zip, for those lacking gzip, 7zip, etc. Suggested by Karl Berry in https://bugs.gnu.org/25538. --- configure.ac | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac index dc0751d..05aa681 100644 --- a/configure.ac +++ b/configure.ac @@ -28,7 +28,8 @@ AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([gzip.c]) AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([build-aux]) AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4]) AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([lib/config.h:lib/config.hin]) -AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11 subdir-objects dist-xz color-tests parallel-tests]) +AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11 subdir-objects dist-xz dist-zip + color-tests parallel-tests]) AM_SILENT_RULES([yes]) # make --enable-silent-rules the default. dnl POSIXCHECK is worthwhile for maintainers, but adds several seconds -- 2.8.0-rc2
