Re: [Mingw-users] msys-bsdtar and mingw-developer-toolkit contents [Was: Updated: msys-xz-5.0.3-1]

[Keith M. <kei...@us...>]

On 08/11/11 17:48, Charles Wilson wrote:
> So, originally, mingw32-bsdtar (well, actually, mingw32-libarchive) was
> provided for two reasons: (1) because it'd be a nice addition for those
> who wanted to use only native tools with no MSYS, but for whom the very
> limited basic-bsdtar was insufficient, and (2) because it came for
> "free" with mingw32-libarchive, and (at the time, pre-mingw-get) I was
> thinking that mingw-get could use libarchive to support its operation.

And, at the time, I'd hoped to use it, but as I recall, there were just
too many unresolved issues for a MinGW build, and you yourself advised
me to follow...

> As it happened, mingw-get instead uses liblzma, libz, and libbz2
> directly for (de)compression support, and implements ONLY 'tar' format
> (de)archive support -- and does so internally.  So, it doesn't use
> libarchive.

...this alternative course.  (In fact, I did base the tar extraction
code on libarchive's bootstrap extractor, and integrated it with my own
decompression classes, using liblzma, libz, and libbz2).

> ... we don't, actually, need libarchive.a [I thought we would, but
> mingw-get went another direction].

One day, we might revisit that decision, but for the foreseeable future
I think what we have in mingw-get is sufficient for our needs -- there
is still a significant development effort required, with a much greater
urgency than adopting libarchive, or adding support for any arbitrary
set of additional archive formats.

-- 
Regards,
Keith.