Laine Stump wrote:

> At 02:51 PM 5/20/99 +1000, Simon Burge wrote:
> 
> >I'm sitting on some hacks for gzip which can decode bzip2 files as well.
> >There'd be nothing to stop people from using that "funny" version of
> >gzip, bzip2ing _all_ the binary sets but still calling them *.tgz files
> >so nothing else (including sysinst) needs changing.  Unfortunately this
> >won't help for 1.4 without a little bit of work as the install media has
> >already been built.
> 
> If I understand you correctly, you're saying that these files would be
> called .tgz, but wouldn't be uncompressible with a standard gzip. That
> sounds like a bad idea to me - if they aren't *standard* gzip files, then
> don't give them a name that implies they are. Otherwise you'll likely
> confuse and piss off people who try to unzip them with normal gzip (eg,
> people like me who want to upgrade onto their current system by untarring
> with the old tar/gzip that's already on their system). Remember that not
> everybody uses sysinst, or even uses the install diskette.

In this particular instance, I was trying to give Brian the simplest
solution to making his CD image, not proposing something for NetBSD at
large.  As you say, it certainly wouldn't be a very good idea at all to
do this in general... 

> Why not just call the files <something>.tbz or something like that? It
> would be unfamiliar to people, who would then hopefully read the README
> file which told them they needed bzip2, but at least the mailing lists
> wouldn't be deluged with "The distribution files are corrupt!" messages.

My first thought was to call binary sets files ".set" or something, but
then we end up with yet-another-file-suffix.  I'm not sure what the best
long-term solution is _if_ we move from ".tgz" files.

> (BTW, why did we switch to the (afaik) "Linux-ism" of .tgz instead of
> .tar.gz? Is the savings of 3 characters really worth it? This screws up the
> mode stuff in my emacs that lets it read .tar.gz files (it does gzip mode
> when it sees .gz, then does tarmode on the results when it sees .tar, but
> since these two modes are separate from each other, there isn't an easy way
> to make it understand .tgz - I end up just renaming the file instead of
> trying to decode elisp).)

Because the sets might live on a dos 8.3 partition on the machines
you're installing them from?  8.3 filenames are pretty much the lowest
common denominator.  This is described in release(7).

Simon.