Mail Archives: cygwin/2001/09/03/09:52:57
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc) [mailto:lhall AT rfk DOT com]
> Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 7:30 PM
> To: Mark Bradshaw; 'cygwin AT cygwin DOT com'
> Subject: RE: press for cygwin
>
>
> At 10:35 AM 8/31/2001, Mark Bradshaw wrote:
> >Hmm... Should I paint a bulls eye on my chest here. Eh. Why not.
> >
> >Couple of quick notes on the thread.
> >
> >1) Complete agreement with Jonathon Merz on the WinZip
> thing. Going to bz2
> >just to thwart WinZip doesn't seem like a good use of
> energy. Unfortunately
> >at the time I wrote the article bz2 wasn't in use for the
> packages. WinZip,
> >being the most popular zip tool for Windows, seemed the
> obvious choice for
> >unzipping the cygwin packages. You wouldn't believe how
> long it takes to
> >get an article printed. :(
>
>
> Just so everyone is clear (in case there still is some
> ambiguity on this
> subject in this thread), discouraging the use of WinZip is
> *not* the root
> of some insidious plot. There's a good reason. That reason is
> WinZip doesn't understand facilities and conventions of Cygwin (like
> symbolic links, mounts, etc). As a result, things installed
> with WinZip
> are very likely to be broken when done. While that's the
> plight of the
> person adopting the wrong install procedure, it leaves a bad
> impression
> with the would-be user and probably generates some email to the list.
> We see plenty of this kind of email now. So the we strongly
> discourage
> the use of WinZip as a result. It is not a robust
> installation procedure
> for Cygwin and we'd like to avoid people trying to use this
> approach, for
> their benefit and ours. Changing to bzip2 format files would do this,
> since the Cygwin installer (setup.exe) can handle bzip2 files just as
> readily as gzip. Of course, some day WinZip will add bzip2
> file support
> and we'll be right back to to square one again! ;-)
Why not then just generate files named ".cgw" instead of ".tar.bz2", and let
cygwin setup.exe know that? Then WinZip will most surely *not* be able to
naturally open these files (neither now or in the future) and this whole
discussion will be closed, as well as any WinZip-related thread.
Note that not all packages should use the new suffix; only essential ones
(like cygwin itself) so that the burden on package developers would not be
too bad: after all, once you've installed the basic cygwin parts using
setup.exe, I doubt you will go back to WinZip! :-)
Best regards,
Bernard
--------------------------------------------
Bernard Dautrevaux
Microprocess Ingenierie
97 bis, rue de Colombes
92400 COURBEVOIE
FRANCE
Tel: +33 (0) 1 47 68 80 80
Fax: +33 (0) 1 47 88 97 85
e-mail: dautrevaux AT microprocess DOT com
b DOT dautrevaux AT usa DOT net
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