Re: Why the rash of people bypassing setup.exe to install?

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

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.

cgf

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