[asdf-install-devel] Dealing with tar on Windows.

[Andy Cristina]

Actually, I'm suggesting ripping off Edi Weitz' lispworks program that
basically does asdf-install for windows with a gui.  There is a lisp
implementation of tar and gzip, with specific changes to make it work
with lispworks (which we could probably change to work on any lisp),
and his program simply downloads asdf packages and does the windows
stuff to make them all accessable (see old Bill Clementson blogs for
short programs which go through a directory tree adding all
directories to the asdf:central-repository, needed due to lack of
symlinks).

Personally, I'd prefer not using cygwin ever again, but others
probably don't feel too strongly.  I know that there are some win32
gnu tars that mostly work, and someone had posted on comp.lang.lisp
about getting asdf-install to work with bsd tar (basically he had
modified the output parsing part of asdf-install).  I'll look into the
tar/gzip in lisp stuff when I get some free time and do a prototype
asdf-install with them, targetting sbcl on windows and linux.
On Nov 12, 2007 2:42 PM, Dan Muller <pikdj2002 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/12/2007 Andy Cristina wrote:
>
> >My knowledge of win32 tar implementations is a bit out of date, but
> >when I last worked on getting asdf-install to work on windows, bsd tar
> >for win32 was the most well supported one.  The various gnu tar ports
> >all had bugs, such as an inability to use paths with spaces in the
> >name (even escaping the spaces with a '\' didn't seem to work).
>
> Hmm, that sounds all-too familiar.
>
> >Would it be worth looking into removing the gnu tar/gzip dependancy
> >altogether in favor of a lisp solution, ala Edi Weitz' lispworks
> >startup thing?  Or is this too big a change for too little gain?
>
> Hard to say. I guess it depends on how onerous people consider installing
> Cygwin to be, since Cygwin's tar works fine.
>
> I assume you're suggesting implementing de-tar and gunzip in Common
> Lisp. How big a task is that?
>
> The only implementation of tar that I found in a quick Google search will
> currently only work on SBCL, and sounds like it might have other
> significant limitations, too.
>
> Decompressing a gzip file doesn't appear to be too bad. Franz has an
> open source implementation, although it's encumbered by the LGPL. I
> just glanced at it to get an idea of the overall size of the code, and
> it's not that big. Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to write it from
> scratch from the spec.
>
> http://www.cs.rice.edu/~froydnj/lisp/tar.lisp
> http://opensource.franz.com/deflate/index.html
>
> There *is* a hook in ASDF-INSTALL for adding functions to process the tar
> file. In retrospect, I could have used that to integrate my changes with
> more backwards compatibility. It could also be used to experiment with a
> native Lisp implementation. In fact, several predefined functions could
> be offered that the user could add to this list, to deal with different
> *external* implementations of tar on different platforms. Hmm.
>
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