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

[Dan Muller]

On 11/12/2007, Andy Cristina wrote:

>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

I downloaded the source for his starter-pack and took a quick look at it.
The tar- and compression-handling code are not an integral part of it;
they're in separate modules (archive and gzip-stream) which he doesn't
advertise distinctly on his home page. I don't know if that's
intention, or an oversight. The URLs for downloading them are embedded
in specials.lisp.

Both of those modules apparently depend on flexi-streams, according to
the data in specials.lisp.

I wonder how all of this gets bootstrapped...

In any case, although interesting, this looks like a somewhat larger task
than I want to tackle right now.

> (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).

Yup, I'm familiar with these, but the technique has some shortcomings. I
have an alternative method that I'd like to package up nicely. I want
to add a means of overriding ASDF-INSTALL's registration and
unregistration activities, so that I can offer this as an external, but
easily configurable, alternative for ASDF and ASDF-INSTALL. *That* is
what I'd rather work on next.

>Personally, I'd prefer not using cygwin ever again, but others
>probably don't feel too strongly. 

Probably depends on whether you're more comfortable with Unix or
Windows. My professional Unix programming days are long past, but I
still dabble, and like it. Cygwin quality is pretty good overall these
days, and the few packages that I frequently use serve me well. I'm
sure there are plenty of people that feel as you do, though, so your
ideas are probably worth pursuing.

As a side note, I think it's even more important that ASDF-INSTALL work
well on Windows than on Unix. Linux systems have their own package
management tools, and e.g. on Debian (what I run at home on one
computer), a lot of CL systems are available that way. I ran into this
dilemma with Perl, too: Do I install something using CPAN, or Debian's
package manager? Wasn't quite sure of all the implications.

Windows, on the other hand, doesn't really have anything like a package
manager. Installer programs generally know little to nothing about
dependencies between independently installable kits.

> 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.

References:
http://www.weitz.de/
http://common-lisp.net/project/gzip-stream/files/gzip-stream_latest.tgz
http://common-lisp.net/project/gzip-stream/files/gzip-stream_latest.tgz
http://www.weitz.de/flexi-streams/

(The two .tgz references come from Edi' specials.lisp in starter-pack
source.)