[R-SIG-Mac] Package management: use zip, accept tar, accept package folders

[Thomas Lumley]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Timothy Bates wrote:
> Suggestion: look at the extension on local file imports, and behave
> appropriately: if it is "tar" then skip the unzip action.
>
> Also, .zip (the OS X archive default) is not a legal compression: only the
> close relative tgz is accepted: is this unnecessarily restrictive?

This is deliberate (or at least was back in the earlier Aqua GUI). The 
reason is that Mac binary packages are .tgz to distinguish them from .zip 
Windows binary and .tar.gz source packages.

> Finally, installing from a  local package directory seems broken: if you
> select the package folder, it is simply ignored (error = no package
> selected)
> If you select the package folder's container, you get the error "no packages
> found". Both seem buggy to me?

The earlier Aqua GUI had separate menu items to install from local 
tarballs or local folders. It's not as easy as it seems to combine them, 
since you then need a file selection dialog that can select either a 
directory or a file.

 	-thomas