Re: [Chicken-users] gunzip dependency

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John Cowan wrote:

Brandon J. Van Every scripsit:

  

What would it take to eliminate chicken-setup's reliance on gunzip on 
Windows?
    

The issue is really twofold:

1) chicken-setup depends on tar to take apart eggs;

2) Chicken does not know if the local tar understands the z option or
   not, so it uses gzip foo.egg | tar xfv - to unpack it.  If the z option
   always worked, then tar xfvz foo.egg would suffice; but SlowLaris tar
   (and I believe also HockeyPux tar) do not understand this option.
  

I would say the issue is really onefold.  Currently, Chicken is relying on external tools to deploy eggs.  These external tools are not generally present on Windows platforms, are awkward to obtain and install for Windows, and they don't work consistently on any platform even when present.  For instance, the GNU Win32 "tar" is not accepting the "-" argument under a Windows command prompt.  Go figure.  I don't want to explain to all the Windows people why everything appears to be broken during their first Chicken users experience.  It's bad engineering and it makes me look bad.

Compression support needs to be implemented in Chicken, and *NOT AS AN EGG*.  You're reading eggs, you jolly well better not need an egg to read an egg.  Which came first, the egg or the egg??!?  The Chicken, goddamn it!

A suitable tar for pure Windows that does understand the z option is
GNUWin32 bsdtar at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/bsdtar.htm .
This version has integrated the zlib library for decompression.

  

Since nobody's got the time to implement the compression support right now, we need to specify a canonical "known good" Windows tar + gunzip, put a prominent link to those on the Chicken homepage, and spell it out in the docs for people.  At present, I don't even know which tar that should be.  The GNU Win32 one sucks.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every