linux tarball is not namespaced

[robey]

If you tar xvf the distribution tarball, at least as of 0.15.1, it will dump a bunch of files in the current folder, not a distribution folder. Normally, a distribution tarball should contain all the files inside a folder with the same name (so prometheus-0.15.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz would unpack into a new folder called prometheus-0.15.1.linux-amd64.

[beorn7]

Yeah, historical reasons for that. Originally, the "bunch of files" was just one, the prometheus binary. Now we have promtool, too, and the console templates... I guess we have to rethink the packaging.

[juliusv]

Other historical reason: we didn't want any versioning in the contained files because we just want to unpack them into the same place always and use the same run script, etc. That would get more annoying when unpacking to a versioned directory. @matthiasr opinion?

[beorn7]

@juliusv That's essentially a SoundCloudism... As @robey said, it's very weird to publicly distribute tar balls that don't create a directory for their content when unpacked...

[robey]

For other services, we have deploy scripts do something like this:

ETCD_FOLDER=$(echo "$ETCD_TARBALL" | sed -e 's/.tar.gz//')
[ -x "$ETCD_FOLDER" ] || tar xf "$ETCD_TARBALL"
rm -f etcd && ln -s "$ETCD_FOLDER" etcd

Then "etcd" is always a symlink to the currently-installed version, which has the advantage of telling us at a glance which version is running, and lets us keep old versions around for rollback. I think this is really common (we certainly didn't invent it). So far, prometheus is the only service I've deployed that doesn't make unix-style tarball folders like this.

[juliusv]

Ok, sounds good to me then. But then we should do this for all our projects for consistency, including those that have only one binary file. @robey wanna give it a try?

[matthiasr]

This should go into the next minor release then, it is a breaking change.

[matthiasr]

PS: with proper packages everything will be ok :)

[robey]

Unless your build is more complicated than it looks, I think that will do it.

[juliusv]

Yep, should be super straightforward.

[lock]

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