[Distutils] PATCH: Expanded tarball abilites

[Greg Ward]

On 24 April 2000, Harry Henry Gebel said:
> I have attached a patch against CVS to expand the functionality of the
> tarball formats in the sdist and bdist commands. It adds the following:

Cool, thanks!  Just checked it in.  Great, now at least 0.8.2 has more
reasons to exist than my paper-bag-over-head bugs.

> I have a patch (but not attached) which detects if tar is GNU tar > 1.13,
> but I do not know if I should submit it because it depends on the
> Unix-only popen2 module. Can it be assumed that only Unix users will
> generate tarballs, and if this assumption can be made should I submit the
> patch? In any case, I don't know very much about tar, so someone else
> would have to put the information to use after it is detected.

Cool, send it in.  Easy solution to the portability problem:

    if hasattr (os, "pipe"):
        # use popen2 to detect GNU tar 1.13
    else:
        # assume primitive tar

Did you finish the job and hack up "sdist" to use the new base dir
option (whatever it is)?  If not, go ahead and submit just the detect
patch -- optionally eliminating the build-tree-of-hard-links step really
should be a distinct patch.

        Greg

-- 
Greg Ward - Unix geek                                   gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
I have many CHARTS and DIAGRAMS ...