Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] call for testing: support for lzma archives

[Tony Theodore]

On 14 September 2010 20:11, Volker Grabsch <address@hidden> wrote:
> Tony Theodore <address@hidden> schrieb:
>> On 14 September 2010 06:42, Mark Brand <address@hidden> wrote:
>> >
>> > Thanks for checking that out. It looks like a safe choice is  "| tar xf -",
>> > although I even considered "| tar xf /dev/stdin"!
>> >
>> > http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/mingw-cross-env/rev/eebfbf8cbcda
>>
>> Seems like the path of least resistance, however, if we made a
>> "modern" tar one of the requirements, we could use the auto-detection
>> and extract most formats with the tar xf $(1) syntax.
>
> That would be really great, but I think we should wait with that
> until such a recent tar version appears at least in Debian/Stable.
>
> (.. and in the other systems, too, but that's usually the case when
> something gets finally into Debian/Stable ;-))
>
>> If we used libarchive (bsdtar), we could also get rid of the UnZip
>> requirement since it can extract these also.
>
> I have no objections with replacing GNU Tar + Unzip with BSD Tar,
> as long as there are binaries for all distros mentioned in our
> "requirements" section. (see below)

Okay, so we'll stick with xz, it's in lenny-backports, but the version
of libarchive is too old. Xz also has the benefit of not having any
clashes with system tools and messing with paths etc. (This is also
the least amount of work since it's already done).

>> We could take it one step further and build a libarchive-native
[...]
>
> I think this is going a little bit too far. :-)

Agreed. I start to think about things like that whenever I look at
Open Solaris again and wonder how to bootstrap a more up-to-date
system.

Cheers,

Tony