On this page: http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/installation.html, you say: “You need a GNU compatible tool to unzip Gradle, if you want the file permissions to be properly set. We mention this as some zip front ends for Mac OS X don’t restore the file permissions properly.”
This makes no sense. There is nothing “GNU” about zip or any zip utilities. You are perhaps confused by gzip, which is a Unix utility that is in the GNU family, but has nothing to do with the gzip format. gzip processes .gz files, not .zip files. If you want people to use the Info-ZIP unzip to extract your files, then you should say that. Info-ZIP has nothing to do with GNU. Note: I am a co-author of the Info-ZIP tools, as well as gzip.
Thanks Mark. Obviously your understanding of zip utilities and their related features goes beyond our user-level understanding!
Any chance you could provide some reworded text that makes sense? We just want to warn users that certain unzip tools will not create the appropriate file permissions required to execute Gradle.
I’m not sure what the problem was that you were trying to address with that gray block “For Un*x users”. What is the bad thing that can happen? Perhaps I could test the extraction to verify that that does not happen.
The issue is that some unzip tools will not set the executable bit correctly when extracting. This means that Gradle won’t function exactly as described in the User Guide.
I’m not sure exactly which tools were the culprits, but I’m guessing there were user-reported problems to prompt this section to be added to the user guide. (It’s been there since early 2009, at least).
I can’t find a problem. By default, Mac OS X will use the built-in Archive Utility.app to extract .zip files when double clicked. It properly restores the executable bits in the bin directory of gradle-1.4-all.zip. The same is true of the built-in unzip command line utility.
I also checked the commonly downloaded utilities Stuffit Expander.app and The Unarchiver.app. Those two restored the executable bits properly as well.
You can simply advise the Mac OS X user to double-click the .zip file and all should be well. If not, they should do a Get Info (command-i) on the .zip file and change the “Open with” to Archive Utility.