Problems installing downloaded ELPA tar file(s) of magit on Win7 Enterprise

Problems installing downloaded ELPA tar file(s) of magit on Win7 Enterprise

[Steinar Bang]

I have to download the .tar files from ELPA archives separately and
install them locally.

However, when I try
 M-x package-install-file
I get the error message:
 package-read-from-string: Can't read whole string

I first tried this without tar being available, so I downloaded GnuWin32
tar and copied the .exe and .dll files into emacs-24.3\bin and then
tried again, but got the same error message.

The only match on google, is this thread
 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2010-11/msg00025.html
and this thread doesn't have any concrete solutions, except for hinting
at using CygWin tar instead of GnuWin32 tar.

Does anyone know if this is fixable, and if so, how to fix it?



Platform:
 Windows 7 Enterprise
 GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601) of 2013-03-17 on MARVIN
 Library is file c:/ProgramFiles/emacs-24.3/lisp/emacs-lisp/package.elc

Packages tried:
 magit-1.2.0.tar (from marmalade)
 magit-20140326.1700.tar (from melpa)

Re: Problems installing downloaded ELPA tar file(s) of magit on Win7 Enterprise

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>:

> I have to download the .tar files from ELPA archives separately and
> install them locally.

> However, when I try
>  M-x package-install-file
> I get the error message:
>  package-read-from-string: Can't read whole string

It was my own mistake: I didn't pay attention when installing GnuWin32
tar, so it ended up in a different place than the other GnuWin32
executables, and weren't copied into the emacs-24.3\bin directory with
the rest.

Once I had copied the GnuWin32 tar.exe file to the emacs-24.3\bin
directory, elpa packages installed without problems.