Would it be possible to get plain tarballs of freepascal hosted on the website?

I am working on a zeroinstall feed for freepascal and I have ran into various issues with all of the current versions.

The Tar of Tarballs is just a bit awkward for zeroinstall to deal with, I've also found problems with distros handling the debs (non deb based ones lacking support files) and bugs in cpio mucking up extraction from the rpms.

Something that is just a plain old tarball of the files needed would simplify things a great deal for me.

I'd be happy if the contents of

ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/2.2.4/i386-linux/fpc-2.2.4.i386-linux.tar

were hosted extracted in the same directory.

In addition to this once I get the feed up and running, perhaps it would be a good idea if someone closer to the build process maintains the feed file (which should only be a 5 minute job per release once all set up (theoretically anyway :-) ))

In our previous episode, Neil Graham said:

Something that is just a plain old tarball of the files needed would simplify things a great deal for me.

Aren't you going into the BSD ports direction then? Source + bootstrap binaries?

Neil Graham wrote

Would it be possible to get plain tarballs of freepascal hosted on the website?

You can get .tgz or .zip files from the Git mirror.

http://github.com/graemeg/freepascal/downloads

Alternatively (seeing that I did not tag the 2.2 and 2.2.4 releases), you can clone the Git repository (only needed once). You can then get updates as you need them (git compresses all updates before they go over the wire, so downloading updates are really small). You can then ask git to generate _clean_ archives of your local git repository. Any revision, any branch or any tag. Git generates plain tar files (default archive format of 'git archive' command), but also supports zip or tar.gz etc.. Here are a few examples of creating such archives:

generate a archive of the v2.0.2 tag (you can specify a revision too):

  $ git archive --prefix=fpc-2.0.2/ v2.0.2 --output=fpc-2.0.2.tar

resulting in a file named fpc-2.0.2.tar. The source code inside the tar archive will have a "fpc-2.0.2" directory as the root directory.

or

generates a archive of v2.0.2 branch and then gzip it:

  $ git archive --prefix=fpc-2.0.2/ v2.0.2 | gzip > fpc-2.0.2.tar.gz

resulting in a file named fpc-2.0.2.tar.gz

or

generates a archive of v2.5.1 (trunk) branch and then zip it:

  $ git archive --format=zip --prefix=fpc-2.5.1/ HEAD --output=fpc-trunk.zip

You can then very easily maintain your own plain tarballs, and no need to download huge archives every so many months.

ZeroInstall can go that way with 0compile, but I'd like to do a binary feed. Perhaps Tarball is terminology reserved for source bundles?

Anyway, what I'd more or less want is a tar.gz or bz2 with all of the same files as the rpm

ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/2.2.4/i386-linux/rpm/fpc-2.2.4-1.i386.rpm

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

You can then very easily maintain your own plain tarballs, and no need to download huge archives every so many months.

That looked all very interesting and complex (I guess after I've done it a bit that goes away)

But does this need me to host the 25 odd meg of freepascal? 'cos that'll hurt a bit.

Neil Graham wrote

That looked all very interesting and complex (I guess after I've done it a bit that goes away)

If you need further help...

$ git help archive

...and for any other command of git, replace the last word with the git command. :-)

But does this need me to host the 25 odd meg of freepascal? 'cos that'll hurt a bit.

It will only be one large download. Then all other updates are really small. Compare that to downloading a 25meg tarball (or whatever size the archive will be) every time you want to update your zeroinstall. Having the git repository local will save you more space and bandwidth in the long run.