John M. Dlugosz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I used Archive::Tar to make up the new release of Exporter-VA-1.2.2.gz, currently in my CPAN authors directory (DLUGOSZ). Could someone check it out for me and make sure the gz file is OK?

For some reason, Winzip doesn't know what to make of it. Normally it will see a gz file contains just a tar and un-nests it properly. Viewing the "inner" manually it sure looks like the stuff is there, but for some reason the Windows tools don't like it.

Meanwhile, I put everyting into a top-level subdir which is what CPAN indexers want. Apparently that is common practice in some cultures, though annoying in the culture I grew up in.

—John

Update:It seems that Winzip only likes it if the file name is *.tar.gz or *.tgz. Ending in *.gz alone confuses it, as it doesn't know that the thing inside the gzip file is a tar.

  • Comment on gzipped tarballs, CPAN, winzip, and all that

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Re: gzipped tarballs, CPAN, winzip, and all that
by Beatnik (Parson) on Jan 07, 2003 at 07:51 UTC
    This may sound a bit silly but I use a make dist and one line in Makefile.PL to do that archiving for me. 
    use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
#yada yada
WriteMakefile(
    'NAME'              => 'Foo::Bar',
    'VERSION_FROM'      => 'Bar.pm', # finds $VERSION
    'PREREQ_PM'         => {}, # e.g., Module::Name => 1.1
    ($] >= 5.005 ?    ## Add these new keywords supported since 5.005
      (ABSTRACT_FROM => 'Bar.pm', # retrieve abstract from module
       AUTHOR     => '') : ()),
    'dist'        => {COMPRESS=>'gzip',SUFFIX=>'gz'},   
);

    [download]
    After a perl Makefile.PL, I just make dist and run to PAUSE to upload the tarball.

    HTH

    Greetz
    Beatnik
    ... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      I get "unknown command make" from the command prompt. The NMAKE that comes with the Microsoft C++ compiler is so unlike make (they kind of missed the point; it doesn't do forward-chaining logic if I recall) that I don't think it would work. What 'make' do you use on a Windows system?
[reply]

        If you have Windows versions of tar and gzip on your path then "nmake dist" will work with the Makefile.PL file shown by Beatnik.

        --
        John.

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Re: gzipped tarballs, CPAN, winzip, and all that
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Jan 07, 2003 at 07:50 UTC
    Where does one get that file?
    (all I see is Exporter-VA_1.2.zip in http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/D/DL/DLUGOSZ/

    Stuff isn't available on CPAN as soon as you upload it, and even sometimes when the file shows up, it's not exactly complete. Wait till it shows up in the recent Uploads list.

    And oh yeah, please include at least a MANIFEST and a README (tsk tsk).

    MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!
    ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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Re: gzipped tarballs, CPAN, winzip, and all that
by osama (Scribe) on Jan 08, 2003 at 03:39 UTC
    Windows tools vary in their support for archive file format, WinZip sometimes has problems with tar.gz, WinRar handles them good (and also handles tar.bz2, gz, bz2, tar, and much more... this seems so much like an ad!)
[reply]
      WinRar? I'll look for that one. I also found Power Archiver which is no longer freeware. I figured out how to get Winzip to read the file. But my main point is to get tools that are just like what the original Perl folks use.

      —John

[reply]
        You can do that with Cygwin, a heavyweight Unix-in-a-Windows solution including a package managemer and a lot of doodads, or Gnu/Win32, a less involved collection of GNU software ports for Win32 platforms. If you just want a tar and gzip / bzip2, stuff from the latter project is far easier to get going.

        Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

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