On Oct 28, 7:32 am, mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> -1 on the rename, too. It will cause massive problems without any
> serious benefit whatsoever. The manual clearly describes what an spkg
> is and provides tools to create them and so on. If one wants to play
> with the innards of Sage and one is stopped by the fact that one does
> not know what an spkg is (and also does not know about "file") one
I'm more concerned about confusing software than confusing people --
for whatever reason, very few tools that are supposed to magically
open things work by using "file" to identify the file type. They all
just look at the extension.
> also does not know about the structure inside an spkg which is much
> more critical.
>
> To add to William's list: rpms for example are also archives with a
> certain structure and I don't see the rpm folks rename their extension
> because it could be less confusing :)
Well, I think they're using those extensions in part because they want
to treat the archives as opaque objects that are only to be
manipulated using a certain abstraction (e.g. you're supposed to use
dpkg -x or dpkg -e to extract the data and control tar archives that
are combined together with ar to form a .deb file) . For Sage, it's
primarily about passing around tarballs containing the Sage versions
of upstream sources, and you really are supposed to manipulate them as
a .tar.bz2 archive. The .deb or .rpm extensions exist to create a new
_type_ for that platform's packages, while Sage .spkg files seem more
like a subclass of the .tar.bz2 type with a format that doesn't seem
very different from the fact that a .tar.gz archive containing the
source of a GNU project is supposed to contain script called configure
that you can run after extracting it to obtain a Makefile, and files
with names like AUTHORS and ChangeLog that have similar information to
a SPKG.txt file.
If people are really convinced that the .spkg name is what they want,
then we can try to solve the problem by getting the bash, midnight
commander, etc. upstreams to treat .spkg files as though they
were .tar.bz2 archives. I do worry that some upstreams may just
refuse to merge support for the .spkg extension, however.
-Tim Abbott
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