Re: cl-defstruct-based package.el, now with ert tests!

[Daniel Hackney <dan@haxney.org>]

Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> wrote:
> Daniel> The changes touch most of the code, but the overall structure of the
> Daniel> code has not changed significantly. Some parts of the code which were
> Daniel> questionable in the first place (such as using `tar-mode' to extract tar
> Daniel> archives) have been replaced with simpler alternatives. In the case of
> Daniel> tar, the file is simply downloaded to a temporary directory and
> Daniel> extracted using "tar xaf foo-1.2.3.tar".
>
> This sounds worse to me, since it means that now package installation
> has an external dependency.  Previously this was not the case --
> intentionally.

The current package.el does use tar, in `package-tar-file-info', which is called
from `package-install-file'. It is used to extract the "foo-pkg.el" file from
the archive. People may not have run into this if they didn't use
`package-install-file'. I can revert this change and use Emacs's `tar-mode' if
people like.

On a related note, is there a way to un-gzip buffers without needing the
external gzip program? I'd like to be able to use gzipped tarballs for package
distribution; it seems strange to be sending around uncompressed tar files.

Are there any other suggestions before it can be committed to the trunk?

--
Daniel Hackney