As in, the Tape ARchiver.

I was experimenting with Haskell's packaging system yesterday, when I 
discovered that when you ask it to build a package file, it actually 
expects to find an executable called "TAR.EXE" in the current search 
path. Obviously, no such thing exists. This is Windoze, not Unix.

When I asked about it in the Haskell IRC channel, I got attacked by 
several fanboys telling me that Tar is The One True Archiver, and that 
all others are Inferior to the Ultimate Perfection that is TAR.

Personally, I thought Tar was completely obsolete now?

On the other hand, other than the equally naff Zip format, I'm not aware 
of anything else that is really widely supported. (Arguably the 7zip 
format is nicer - but who supports that? Er, yeah, 7zip. And nobody 
else.) Does anybody here know different?

I don't know for a fact, but I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing 
the program did was try to find "GZIP.EXE". :-P

Some fanboy yelled at me that you can't be a "real developer" if you 
don't have tools that support Tar. Of course, my problem is not the lack 
of such tools - I have 7zip, which handles Tar just fine. My problem is 
that I don't have a program named "TAR.EXE" which accepts the same CLI 
options as GNU Tar.

Then another fanboy yelled at me that it's "easy" to find a Win32 port 
of Tar. Sure, it's so "easy" in fact that I wasted an entire afternoon 
trying to do this and ultimately failed.

Specifically, I found a TAR.EXE, but it instantly crashes because it 
can't find "cygwin.dll". And, almost unbelievably, I can't find anywhere 
on the face of the Internet where I can download this file - including 
the Cygwin website!

So the guy yelled at me "well why don't you have Cygwin installed 
already?" Er, hello? Why should I have to set up an entire Unix 
emulation environment just to develop Haskell programs? Haskell is 
supposed to be portable, remember? Suffice it to say the guy didn't 
think I could be a "real developer" if I don't have Cygwin installed.

Still, that's nothing. The "standard package layout guide" recommends 
that your package's test suite should be named "runtests.sh". As in, a 
Unix shell script. Well *that* should be nice and portable, eh?

These problems are not exactly unsolvable. For example, there is a 
program called Darcs. It's a revision control system written in Haskell. 
It stores change sets in GZipped files. But it doesn't require you to 
install GZip to run it. It's statically linked against the GZip library. 
In other words, you put DARCS.EXE in your search path, and it just 
*works*. Why is Haskell's packager not like this? (I hypothisize that 
the answer is: Because nobody ever tests Haskell code on Windoze!)

Talking about all this on the IRC channel, somebody eventually pointed 
out that there's an add-on extra that automates some parts of building 
and using Haskell packages. And that it *can* build package files on 
Windoze without requiring any external tools. But this is a new, 
experimental, add-on. You have to find and install it yourself, 
manually. (Whereas the Haskell packaging system is a standard part of 
the development environment.)

Immature software, anyone?

Anyway, I'm ranting now...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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