Subject: bug#13324: Improvements to "dist" targets

From: Peter Rosin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:51:49 +0100

On 2013-01-02 14:04, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> On 01/02/2013 02:01 PM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> On 01/02/2013 02:58 AM, 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.
>>>
>> While this is absolutely true, my point is that it's not a format truly
>> used or required for distribution tarballs.  If you are going to compile
>> an Automake-based package from source on MS Windows, you'll need either
>> MinGW/MSYS or Cygwin, and AFAICS both those environment comes with
>> working tar and gzip programs.
>>
>> Or is there something that I'm missing?

Yes, I believe quite a few projects have a separately maintained Visual
Studio solution, seeded with handwritten config.h etc, meaning that they
don't require Autotools to build from source on Windows.

I can't give you an example off the top of my head though, but I think
that e.g. ntp is like that (and I don't know if they also provide the
source as a .zip-file...)

Cheers,
Peter