multiple distfiles from multiple sources and with multiple compression types

[René J. V. Bertin]

Rainer Müller wrote:


> In case of multiple distfiles you will always specify the full name
> anyway. This would be that for an option such as this example:
> 
> distfiles    foo.tar.gz \
>              bar.tar.xz

Yes, *fetching* isn't the problem here.

> It is fairly obvious how to extract these files. There is usually no
> need to specify how these files should be extracted, since most
> compression methods can be deduced from the filename.
> 
> The command 'use_* yes' would then only set the extract.suffix
> accordingly, instead of the explicit extract.cmd. These two options
> would then be equivalent:
> 
> use_xz yes
> extract.suffix .tar.xz

Still, how would that be implemented in "base", except by an algorithm that 
determines how to extract each file (that is to be handled in the extract phase) 
based on the filename or (better) from a magic cookie?

R.