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Are tarballs obsolete?

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81–85 of 85 posts

Re: Are tarballs obsolete?

#81
post #31

No! Things like package managers and git, however pervasive, are agents and not the testable, serialized representation of data. Why wouldn't you make the same file set available as a single download via plain, old HTTP(S)? What's so hard about that? Why place something on a shelf, behind an agent that demands a learning curve, when it could also be available to a browser? You CAN'T hash a tree of files quickly by ha…

> Why place something on a shelf, behind an agent that demands a learning curve, when it could also be available to a browser? wget git clone What is the difference in learning curve ? > With a single file, available by HTTP, any platform can get to it, so if your machine dies, and you have to call a friend for help, and they don't use the same OS, they won't have to install a special tool, or hope an intervening thi…

    'git' is not recognized as an internal or external command, 
    operable program or batch file.

Re: Are tarballs obsolete?

#82
post #80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-x means extract -f means force and my favorite to put in there is: -v for verbose This shows you all of the files being processed, sometimes it can be really helpful to see. Try: tar -xvf

Actually, -f makes tar read from a file instead of stdin.

indeed http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=tar+-xvf

Re: Are tarballs obsolete?

#83
I love tarballs. They got a whole lot more enjoyable with all the paralell compression utilities out there. My favourite is for a file format that has fallen out of grace (bzip2) [1]. It is fast enough to make IO the bottleneck on my HDD (although not on my ssd).

1:http://compression.ca/pbzip2/

Re: Are tarballs obsolete?

#84
post #69
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, even for the Linux kernel, it's only a few hundred megabyte.

My bare Linux repository comes to 1.2GB. A git gc run got it down to 1.1GB.

Oh, true. I just checked. I think I mixed up two numbers.

Re: Are tarballs obsolete?

#85
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This becomes more complex when distributions want to patch configure.ac or Makefile.am -- they need to patch the included Makefile.in files as well. Trying to balance these two forces is the reasoning behind the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE flag. These days, I prefer to simply use git archive for a tarball and make users run autogen.sh themselves. See https://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2011/09/08/am_maintainer_mode-... and the asso…

To the newcomer, autoconf looks really scary. Are there any good tutorials and are there clear advantages of using autoconf over CMake, waf, scons, ninja or other hipster-language-build-systems? I'm going to start looking at CMake to build HTML and javascript based projects soon.

CMake has been a huge improvement over autoconf and over visual studio projects/solutions for me. I have a repeatable and multiplatform build system with CMake. Autoconf seems like the ugly and old bastard brother of CMake in comparison, and that's praising autoconf.

However I don't know if CMake is really the best fit to build html projects. In fact, I don't know what should be built about them... my composer scripts barely copy some JavaScript and CSS files to the public/assets folder, nothing fancy like what CMake has to do.

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