Re: Improvements to "dist" targets

[Stefano Lattarini]

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?

> It is quite common (and a good practice) for a project to distribute
> \n newlines in a tarball and \r\n newlines in a zip archive.
>
But the Automake "dist-*" recipes don't do this, so you'd need to roll
your own rule if you want to support this use case (such a rule could
of course leverage on the "distdir" Automake rule to do much of the
work).

Regards,
  Stefano