[Rd] cygwin tar?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Martyn Plummer wrote:

> I had the same problem as Tony with multiple copies of cygwin1.dll. But
> doesn't this solution (renaming cygwin1.dll in the tools directory) just
> link the tools with the cygwin1.dll that comes with cygwin? In which
> case will it work if the tools are linked against a different version of
> the cygwin1 library? 

It may or it may not.  At least some cygwin1.dll's are broken and cause 
tar to malfunction.

I don't uninstall cygwin, but I do ensure that its path is not mounted, 
since if it thinks there is a /bin/cygwin1.dll or /usr/bin/cygwin1.dll it 
complains, even if that is really C:/packages/usr/bin/cygwin1.dll and not 
in your path.

> To answer Jeff's question
> > 
> >  if($WINDOWS) {
> >      ## workaround for paths in Cygwin tar
> >      $filepath =~ s+^([A-Za-x]):+/cygdrive/\1+;
> >  }
> > 
> > in the build script and don't think it needs to be there since you can
> > use the tar utility that comes with mingw, yes?
> 
> You're talking about the tar that comes with MSYS. And no you can't use
> it because it can't handle symbolic links, a problem that is discussed
> in the documentation.

That's not the only problem I have met with MSYS's tar, if that is what 
was meant.  It often had problems for me in the middle of .tar.gz archives 
that other systems are happy with.

I do know how to solve this, but I am not going to put the effort in to do 
so.  So the situation will remain

	`follow the instructions or don't ask for help'.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595