Please provide *.zip and maybe also *.bz2 downloads.
Uwe Hermann - October 9, 2004 - 06:16
| Project: | Project |
| Version: | 6.x-1.x-dev |
| Component: | Releases |
| Category: | feature request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | postponed |
Description
As seen in http://drupal.org/node/11158, it might be worthwile to provide an additional drupal-x.x.x.zip distribution in addition to the tarball, as many (Windows) people don't know anything about tar and gzip.
It's also not very widely known that winzip can perfectly extract tarballs.
While we're at it, a .tar.bz2 distribution might be nice, too.
#1
the general feeling about this, is not to do this. Setting status to "postponed" and will be closed in 2 month if no-one is picking this up. feel free to provide a shell script that we would be able to use for repacking including all themes and modules or update ticket in any other way.
#2
Which script is currently used to build the tarballs? Is it available for download or included in CVS somewhere? It should need only minimal changes to build additional zip files.
#3
It's been postponed for nearly two years.
What's the status, now?
#4
while it is true that not all windows apps know about tar and gz, there are enough tools out there for windows platforms that do understand this.
Since adding other versions of drupal.tar.gz only adds extra work and difficulties for the enduser ("which one should i download") and on the drupal learning curve unzipping a tarball is only a very small step, i label this wont fix.
#5
Looking at the Joomla download statistics zip is favored over tar by a wide margin. I'm not a fan of the format but I can't help fearing that a significant percentage of potential Drupal users stop at the file download stage. Are these users that Drupal wants to keep? I'm marking this issue as active for now as this could potentially be significant.
#6
I don't care about what joomla users prefer.
#7
Citing the fact that Joomla! users choose these helps prove the case for providing them instead of (or in addition to) tar.gz. Just today I talked to yet another new Drupal user who struggled with this problem.
I guess this first step is to work on this to provide support for multiple downloads files inside of the schema/code of Project* (project* team please correct this if I've put it in the wrong place).
#8
When my wife first downloaded Drupal she had zero idea what to do with the tar.gz file after it was downloaded. She then went to the handbooks and spent maybe 30 minutes trying to figure out what to do. I think that this particular time the getting started stuff was in pretty bad shape, and that contributed to the problem, but given that downloading Drupal is the first step for a lot of new users, if they can't even figure out what to do with the file then they're in trouble.
Remember also that by default windows XP and Vista can extract .zip archives, but I don't believe they can extract tar.gz archives. So that means that users then have to go and download and install additional software before they can even extract Drupal. That's not great usability.
This would be pretty trivial to do except for one problem--at the moment release nodes can only handle one attachment. So, with the current configuration, we'd have to have two release nodes, one for a .tar.gz file and one with a .zip file, for each tag. That would be pretty counterintuitive and probably would be a mess to code.
So, in order for this feature request to be possible, project release nodes need to be able to accommodate multiple files. At the moment, project_release is using its own custom code to handle attachment of files, instead of using the core upload module. There's already an issue for this specific part at #179471: release file attachments should use drupal upload functionality. I'm going to mark this issue as postponed until that issue is fixed or until someone makes an alternate suggestion that would be effective.
As I mention in the issue I just linked to, one difficulty with doing this is how to structure the download tables if there are multiple files per release node. Please follow up in that issue if you have any suggestions.
#9
Current status: We're 90% of the way there, thanks to the following:
#357920: Numerous errors when previewing/submitting a new release node
#366448: Port packaging script to new {project_release_file} schema
#539282: Denormalize release info a bit and store latest and recommended releases in {project_release_supported_versions}
#539668: Expose files attached to releases to views
#539676: Expose {project_release_supported_versions} data to views
We're basically now just blocked on these two:
#539682: Replace hard-coded release download table with a view
#555362: Support multiple download links in the available updates report (e.g. tar.gz + zip packages on drupal.org)
There's a bit more drupal.org UI to figure out, but mostly that'd be handled via #539682. Almost ready to call this active again. ;)