CL-TAR v0.2.0
Tagged as blog, common-lisp
Written on 2022-01-04 23:00:00 UTC
I just released the first version of
cl-tar
(previously). That I consider to have the minimum
set of features necessary to make it usable and useful.
Unfortunately, there seems to be something wrong with the Gitlab Pages setup for its documentation so you can't see the very beautiful docs :(. I'll update this post when it's fixed. For now, the README will likely give you everything you need to know, particularly the Quickstart section.
This release brings:
- transparent gzip compression and decompression
- convenience function for creating an archive from the file system, while preserving hard links, symlinks, block and character devices, fifos, and most metadata ({a,c,m}time, uname, gname, uid, gid). And, yes, sym and hardlinks are preserved even on Windows!
- A precompiled executable for Linux AMD64. This implements extraction and creation and could (if you're daring) replace GNU (or BSD) tar for those purposes.
It's still v0.2.0, so interfaces may break in the future. But, I'm going to do my best to prevent that (yay keyword args!).
You can find the new versions
at https://gitlab.common-lisp.net/cl-tar/cl-tar/-/releases/v0.2.0
and https://gitlab.common-lisp.net/cl-tar/cl-tar-file/-/releases/v0.2.0. I've
also requested that both cl-tar and cl-tar-file be added to Quicklisp.
Known Issues
- Sym and hard link extraction do not work on Windows (yet). This was just a matter of the amount of time I had to work on this (it was my xmas present to myself). It should not be technically hard to implement.
- Extracting to the file system can be pretty slow (regardless of compression). I've profiled it to see the hotspots and have a bit of an idea how to speed it up.
- Creation of archives from the file system on Windows requires https://github.com/osicat/osicat/pull/57. On another note: I barely use Windows, so if there's anyone with more Windows experience out there I'd appreciate it if you looked at the PR with a fresh set of eyes.
- I'd like to make more precompiled binaries. Again, this was mostly a matter of time (setting up all the correct CI runners and debugging them).