Force unpack to move the archive, rather than unpack it

[cgruber]

In some cases, "unpack" is the wrong metaphor, as the package being downloaded, while a package, should not be expanded (such as a .jar file, which can be made into an executable). Allowing a configuration where is not expanded, but just moved as-is into a pkg directory, which can then be linked-to, would be very useful.

As a use-case, grabbing ktfmt from the maven-all-deps artifact, the expander blows up, trying to extract it. It should be able to be told to just move it into .../Caches/hermit/pkg/ktfmt-0.41/ktfmt-0.41-jar-with-dependencies.jar which can then be manipulated to make it an executable jar (prefix a shebang script) and then linked and chmoded.

[alecthomas]

Aha, interesting! Somehow, even though we have existing JVM tools like Gradle this is the first time this has come up, but it does seem like a good idea. To actually execute it we'd typically ship a wrapper script that gets installed into the Hermit env. This would be included in the hermit-packages repo alongside the package definition.

[cgruber]

Is there any way to hijack the unpack event now, even if it's not a first-class solution?

[cgruber]

I think Gradle worked because gradle ships a zip containing its scripts and things, not a single .jar that can be executed by itself.