[ESS] ess-17.11-tgz is not compressed

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Martin Maechler <maechler using stat.math.ethz.ch>
>>>>>     on Thu, 7 Dec 2017 17:37:23 +0100 writes:

>>>>> Neil Shephard <nshephard using gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Tue, 5 Dec 2017 08:18:08 +0000 writes:

    >> Hi, I've only just caught up on the update to ess-17.11
    >> and went to install it using the Gentoo Linux package
    >> management system portage.

    >> It complained that the ess-17.11.tgz was not a compressed
    >> archive and this appears to be true, its just a plain
    >> tar-ball.

    > well, I'm managing the ess.r-project.org server and I have
    > actually mounted the file system where ess-17.11.tgz lives
    > and 'ls -l' and 'file' say

    > ls -l ess-17.11.tgz -rw-r--r--. 1 maechler sfsstaff
    > 3275703 Nov 13 15:13 ess-17.11.tgz

    > file ess-17.11.tgz ess-17.11.tgz: gzip compressed data,
    > last modified: Mon Nov 13 14:13:29 2017, from Unix

    > (and read on)

    >> This means that when portage trys to unpack it based on
    >> the file extension '.tgz' it tries to uncompress it,
    >> which fails.

    >> For now I've change the ebuild (the scripts which install
    >> programmes under Gentoo/Linux) to use the ess-17.11.zip
    >> but thought this worth reporting.  I include below
    >> downloading the ess-17.11.tgz and attempting to
    >> unzip/uncompress manually, what finally worked was
    >> renaming to ess-17.11.tar and untar the archive.

    >> Details of this are also on Gentoo Buzilla at
    >> https://bugs.gentoo.org/639752

    >> Regards,

    >> Neil

    > Now look closely at the output of wget -- which I can
    > reproduce in my (Fedora 26) Linux :

    >> ~/tmp/ess $ wget
    >> http://ess.r-project.org/downloads/ess/ess-17.11.tgz
    >> --2017-12-05 08:12:09--
    >> http://ess.r-project.org/downloads/ess/ess-17.11.tgz
    >> Resolving ess.r-project.org... 129.132.119.195 Connecting
    >> to ess.r-project.org|129.132.119.195|:80... connected.
    >> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length:
    >> 3275703 (3.1M) [application/x-tar]
    >           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    >> Saving to: ‘ess-17.11.tgz’
    >> 
    >> ess-17.11.tgz
    >> 100%[===========================================================================================>]
    >> 3.12M 6.30MB/s in 0.5s
    >> 
    >> 2017-12-05 08:12:09 (6.30 MB/s) - ‘ess-17.11.tgz’ saved
    >> [8898560]
    >                                                            ^^^^^^^^

    > so indeed wget seems to do __silly!__ behave a bit
    > magically nowadays ... -- at least being honest about it:

    > It gets a *.tgz of size 3275703 bytes (~ 3.1 M) and
    > internally uses gunzip absolutely with*OUT* saying so, but
    > then honestly reports that the result is of size 8898560
    > bytes

    > I'm appalled.

    > Note one thing though: For 2 year or so, 'tar' has become
    > smart enough to "see" if it needs to uncompress or not; so
    > for practical purposes, you nowadays can use

    >   tar xf <file>

    > and it will do the right thing if the file is compressed
    > or not.

Well, not quite:  If the file ends in  *.tgz  it tries
automatically to use gunzip on it and fails...
so it seems the manual 'mv ...tgz ...tar'  seems needed.

Ok, now having skimmed the result of  'wget --help', I see
(among HTTP options) :

     --compression=TYPE          choose compression, one of auto, gzip and none

and indeed some silly people made 'auto' the default *and*
forgot to implement a renaming of *.tgz --> *.tar in the case of
auto compression.

The solution for (tested):  Use   wget --compression=none  :

$ wget --compression=none http://ess.r-project.org/downloads/ess/ess-17.11.tgz
--2017-12-07 17:40:02--  http://ess.r-project.org/downloads/ess/ess-17.11.tgz
Resolving ess.r-project.org (ess.r-project.org)... 129.132.119.195
Connecting to ess.r-project.org (ess.r-project.org)|129.132.119.195|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 3275703 (3.1M) [application/x-tar]
Saving to: 'ess-17.11.tgz.1'

ess-17.11.tgz.1        100%[==========================>]   3.12M  --.-KB/s    in 0.04s   

2017-12-07 17:40:02 (81.1 MB/s) - 'ess-17.11.tgz.1' saved [3275703/3275703]

--
Martin Maechler ETH Zurich