Provide consistent release file types

[lewisfm]

Right now every platform supported by the embedded toolchain has its own download file type:

• macOS uses DMG
• Windows uses Zip
• Linux uses tar.xz

This makes it more difficult to create scripts or command line tools that download the toolchain in an automated way, because they need to have 3 slightly different versions of the same logic for each platform. macOS releases are also difficult to unpack on other platforms because DMG is a platform-specific file format.

If there was a consistent, cross-platform file type that releases were provided in, it would be easier to create cross-platform scripts and inspect the contents of the toolchain on all platforms. I think tar.xz would be a good choice because all supported platforms have tar built-in and from my own testing it is roughly 1/3 the size of the equivalent DMG file.

[voltur01]

Hi, thank you for raising this!

Originally in the LLVM ET toolchain macOS package was a *.tar.gz, however it was causing extra manual steps, so it was updated to *.dmg to improve user experience: ARM-software/LLVM-embedded-toolchain-for-Arm#283 - there may be a different way to achieve the same with *.tar.gz however we did not investigate after this change. Would be useful to know if you have suggestions.

[lewisfm]

I've found that tar.gz/xz files downloaded with curl or wget don't have quarantine applied because those CLI tools don't set the com.apple.quarantine flag on downloaded files, whereas major browsers do. I believe the macOS tar is aware of this flag and will propagate it when extracting. Maybe a tarball could be provided in tandem with the DMG for use on the CLI?

[voltur01]

Thank you for sharing the details!

I think that adding the tar.xz option in GitHub release may be confusing and will need to put the documentation back that explains that manuals actions are needed after usual download in a browser - not great from user experience point of view.

For automated installation Arm Keil team maintain a vcpkg repository https://www.keil.arm.com/artifacts/ that hosts ATfE as well, particularly tar.xz for macOS to be consumed by vcpkg from Visual Studio Code, see https://artifacts.tools.arm.com/llvm-embedded/ and instructions here https://www.keil.arm.com/artifacts/#using-other-download-methods

For local builds, pack TXZ can be used after the *.dmg package was built to package the same content as tar.zx, see https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/cpack_gen/archive.html

Hope this helps.