Well, it's been a total failure

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 09/13/2010 07:47 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 09/13/2010 05:56 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> There's nothing wrong about preferring Windows over Linux. I'm just
>>>> saying (much like you) that badly reinventing Unix tools under Windows
>>>> is not quite productive.
>>>
>>> The unix version of zip has no option to set the file attributes either.
>>
>> It does preserve them. Zip a binary and then unzip it - it'll run.
>
>
> zip on unix has no way to set the Windows attributes, and zip on Windows
> has no way to set the unix attributes. Both have attributes that have no
> analogs on the other. Both have no way to set the non-native attributes.

I didn't know there is an executable attribute on Windows.

Anyhow, I guess that underlines the necessity to do what everybody does 
- assemble the installer on the distribution platform, and have it only 
contain the files for that platform. An increasingly large audience is 
looking at us, and we should avoid being provincial. I'm not even sure 
why we're having this discussion - there should be no debate here: we do 
what people do. This reminds me of the discussion of yesteryear - people 
were complaining about C++ files in dmd having the .c extension, and the 
right answer would have been to change the blessed thing to be like 
everybody else has it, instead of finding arguments on why it worked the 
way it was.


Andrei