>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Jun 18 15:42:51 2002
>> I am currently spending most of my time with star and "true incremental dumps".
>> I hopte that I will be able to convince people to stop using the non-standard
>> GNU tar in favor of my better and even older star.
>I don't think most people have the slightest interest in star, because the
>tar which comes from the vendor works fine for them. I appreciate that
People do not have interest because they don't know and this is because VENDORS
do not put star on the distributions.
If you only use tar x or tar c, and don't know what else is supported you
believe that GNU tar is sufficient.
Instead for unknown reasons, vendors put the non-standard compliant GNu tar on.
Is it really that Linux people dislike standards as much as M$ does?
>star works for certain corner cases and enormous files, but most people
>don't have a problem and don't want to switch to another program with
>different command line options than the vendor. In truth the speed
>advantage star once had is now only valuable on really old slow machines.
>Vendor tar will saturate the output device unless it's a raw disk
>partition. backup via NIC or tape is hardware limited.
- Star has a lot of features I use every day that are missing in
GNU tar. If people start using star on a daily base they never will
use GNu tar anymore because it lacks important things that make life
easier.
- GNUtar cannot feed DLT tapes fast enough. The result is that the
media wears out. Star allows to set up e.g. 128 MB or more of FIFO
and gives streaming reserve for 30+ seconds.
- GNUtar does not do a good job with incremental dumps because it uses
a badly defined media format. Star will be the first program that
gives the same or more than you get with ufsdump/ufsrestore.
Star will do this portable and OS/FS independant.
- GNUtar gives many compatibility problems because it ignores standards.
Note that GNU tar has been started in 1989 from PD tar aka. SUG tar
and still ignores even POSIX.1-1988. Star implements POSIX.1-2001 for
10 months now.
>I don't say this because I dislike star, just that I (and most people)
>have no reason to change. Most people care so little about the "ANSI
>format" that they don't even know about the "-Hustar" option to cpio,
>which write ANSI (I believe there are a few corner cases again, but the
>format is correct for anything most people ever want to do).
>
>> Once I have time, I will add support...
>Your time is your own, but I doubt that any amount of added features will
>make most users change, they have no problems with what they have.
>Virtually everyone uses cdrecord, it's higher in both utilization and
>appreciation.
For sake, many users are force to change now ;-0
Star is the only backup tool on Linux that allows to archive ACLs.
If you like to know that's wrong with TAR on Linux, check the new program
"tartest" that comes with the latest star alpha.
Also check the testscripts anf archives from:
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/testscripts/
Jörg
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) chars I am J"org Schilling
URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
