Subject: Re: bug#42162: Recovering source tarballs

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:49:27 +0100

Hello!

Timothy Sample <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> I hope you’re well.  I was wondering if you’ve had the chance to fiddle
>> with Disarchive since the summer?
>
> Sort of!  I managed to get the entire corpus of tarballs that I started
> with to work (about 4000 archives).  After that, I started writing some
> documentation.  The goal there was to be more careful with serialization
> format.  Starting to think clearly about the format and how to ensure
> long-term compatibility gave me a bit of vertigo, so I took a break.  :)
>
> I was kind of hoping the initial excitement at SWH would push the
> project along, but that seems to have died down (for now).  Going back
> to making sure it works for Guix is probably the best way to develop it
> until I hear more from SWH.

Yeah, I suppose they have enough on their plate and won’t add it to
their agenda until we have shown that it works for us.

>> I’m thinking there are small steps we could take to move forward:
>>
>>   1. Have a Disarchive package in Guix (and one for guile-quickcheck,
>>      kudos on that one!).
>
> This will be easy.  The hang-up I had earlier was that I vendored the
> pristine-tar Gzip utility (“zgz”).  Since then I don’t think it’s such a
> big deal.

Yeah.

> (I wrote Guile-QuickCheck ages ago!  It was rotting away on my disk
> because I couldn’t figure out a good way to use it with, say, Gash.  It
> has exposed several Disarchive bugs already.)

Neat!  I’m sure many of us would love to use it.  :-)

> This all will have to wait in the queue for a bit longer, but I should
> be able to return to it soon.  I think the steps listed above are good,
> along with some changes I want to make to Disarchive itself.

Alright!  Let us know if you think there are tasks that people should
just pick and work on in the meantime.

Thanks for the prompt reply!

Ludo’.