Re: Improvements to "dist" targets (was: Re: EXTRA_DIST, directories, tar --exclude-vcs)

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 1 Jan 2013, 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.  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.

The unzip from Info-ZIP supports the -a option to auto-convert text 
files to use MS-DOS line terminations.  It is not really necessary to 
convert to MS-DOS format while packaging.

Also, it seems that 'notepad' (default for opening .TXT files) is 
virtually the only Windows text editing program which fails to deal 
with Unix line terminations.  Windows development tools have no 
problems with Unix line terminations.

For my own project, we have ditched zip and switched to 7-zip instead 
because it compresses much better.

BZip is reaching the point of so little value, it looks like it should 
be tossed.  Gzip files are not much larger and can serve for the case 
where the most universal format is needed.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/