Inconsistent format for 1.41 release assets

[gvinaccia]

the 1.41 release assets are in zip format instead of the usual .tar.gz, and the linux zip archive includes a tarball

[Flimm]

The instructions for installing the Linux version on this page are incorrect: https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/releases/tag/1.41 The instructions expect a .tar.gz file, whereas the download is a .zip file.

[simonmichael]

Thanks for the reports!

the 1.41 release assets are in zip format instead of the usual .tar.gz, and the linux zip archive includes a tarball

IIRC,

• everything is in a zip because of a github limitation; it essentially forces that
• linux and mac have a tarball inside the zip to preserve the executable file permissions (zip doesn't do that). It removes one extra step / source of confusion for installers.

The instructions for installing the Linux version on this page are incorrect:

• they and the mac instructions should be correct now.

[gvinaccia]

Thank you @simonmichael for the quick reply and the wonderful piece of software

[simonmichael]

Thanks! I'll close this then, noting that an easier binary command would be nice.

[simonmichael]

I researched this again. Here are some links on the github zip limitation:

• https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact?tab=readme-ov-file#zip-archives
• upload-artifact zips .tar.gz archive actions/upload-artifact#109

I have forgotten if the limitation is with the upload-artifact tool, or github releases in general. I kind of thought it was the latter.

So when I see tar.gz files on some projects' releases, eg https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/tag/3.6, I'm assuming those were uploaded by hand. Or, they are actually zip files, containing a tar.gz file, I can't be bothered to check just now.

I also found some tools that aim to make downloading github binaries easier (eget, ubi, gah, gogo, and github's own gh tool).

And, I found a project that uses gh to create and upload artifacts to releases (instead of upload-artifact). Still not sure if that gets around the zip limitation but it was a useful discovery, I can use that in lots of ways.

[hseg]

@simonmichael Looking at https://cli.github.com/manual/gh_release_create (look for the example uploading ./dist/*.tgz), it appears that may be a solution.

Returning to the old behaviour would be nice for me, since Arch Linux's makepkg tries to autoextract1 the artifact, but ends up only unwrapping the .zip container, leaving the .tar intact. Which makes sense, because both are archive formats, so you wouldn't want the automagic to extract both.

[simonmichael]

Reopening this for future improvement.