Invisible wrote:
> Personally, I thought Tar was completely obsolete now?

HUH? 99.999% of programming projects give their code in .tar.gz or .tar.bz2
archives.

> 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?

7zip is better, but the only complete implementation is tied to Windows
features... (p7zip doesn't support PPMd compression, for example, only
LZMA).

> 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.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gtar.htm

> 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!

cygwin.dll? That must be an ancient program. cygwin1.dll is what all cygwin
programs use now.

As for getting the dll... you download setup.exe, which is a package manager
on its own. The default options should come with tar already, otherwise
select it from the huge package list. You'll get a full bash shell in a
window :)

> 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.

OK that gets immature from his part :)

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