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Message-ID: <20030215000815.45437.qmail@web21403.mail.yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 16:08:15 -0800 (PST)
From: Rick Rankin <rick_rankin AT yahoo DOT com>
Subject: Re: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install?
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
In-Reply-To: <20030214222838.GA14308@redhat.com>
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--- Christopher Faylor <cgf AT redhat DOT com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 02:21:18PM -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
> >Chris,
> >
> >At 13:59 2003-02-14, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >>On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 07:50:48AM +1100, andrew clarke wrote:
> >>>On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 01:26:15PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> ...
> >>>
> >>>If I may, speaking on behalf of some of the less-technical Cygwin users,
> >>>some points:
> >>>
> >>>Obviously for simple .tar.bz2 files without any dependencies or post-
> >>>install scripts, etc, untarring would appear to users to be a harmless
> >>>thing to do.
> >
> >Maybe a new naming convention might serve to deter the naive: 
> >PackageName-versionOrDateTag.car ("Cygwin ARchive"). It would still be 
> >a BZip2-compressed TAR file, just as Java's ".jar" files are PKZIP 
> >files under a different name (and with some extra content structuring 
> >conventions).
> 
> You know, I almost mentioned that but I think that someone (Robert
> Collins maybe?) may have suggested this previously and I adamantly
> intoned that these were ".tar.bz2 files dammit".
> 
> However, changing the extension would go some way towards alleviating
> this problem and it would open the door to creating different package
> formats, identifiable by magic number.
> 
> I was also thinking of creating a '/dev/tty' file in the archive which
> was just a real file containing the words "Hey! What are YOU DOING???" I
> think that would cause a tar extraction to print that message to the
> screen.  Don't know what it would do to setup.exe, though.

I think I'm confused. If you do this, then every time we run tar we'd see "Hey!
What are YOU DOING???" unless we removed /dev/tty? If so, it seems to me like
that would be annoying and it would be a pain to have remember to go remove
/dev/tty after every time we run setup to *avoid* that message.  

--Rick

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