On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Joerg Schilling wrote: > >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.
It's not just Linux and BSD (and HURD?), I don't know of anyone who even provides it, much less makes it default. > If you only use tar x or tar c, and don't know what else is supported you > believe that GNU tar is sufficient. That is exactly the point I was making. Star is better at doing things most people don't do. Therefore "GNU tar is sufficient," at least for most people. > Instead for unknown reasons, vendors put the non-standard compliant GNu tar on. That's slightly unfair, every commercial vendor has a tar which was derived from some AT&T UNIX tar, every free distribution uses GNU tools. And as you note the tar they have works well for transferring a few files or taking a backup. And the tar files seem to work nicely across systems unless they contain some of the corner cases I mentioned. > Is it really that Linux people dislike standards as much as M$ does? No, but they see the GNU tool suite as a standard. And it's maintained by a group of people rather than an individual, which is a factor, like it or not. > - 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. You said it yourself, if you only use x, c, and t any tar is fine. If you don't care if you write a tar file which is subtly non-POSIX, and tar is fine if other systems can read it. > - 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. Again most people don't have those tapes, and frankly can use mbuff to do buffering in a pipe. CPU isn't an issue. I agree that a system with DLT is unlikely to miss 128MB, but the bulk of your users have no need and would miss the memory. > - 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. Very few people do incremental dumps, including me. I would rather do a full dump unless the data set is very large. And there are other tools to do incremental. > - GNUtar gives many compatibility problems because it ignores standards. Unless you are dumping huge files or non-files, that simply doesn't seem to be an issue. I pull Linux tar files on systems from unicos to SunOS (yes, the ten year old one), AIX and BSD, SCO and Dell (V.4). For most people star solves a problem they don't have. It's a great tool, but most people see no benefit over vendor tar, and the command line options are not the same. Or they may match some tar I never use beyond x,c,t level. > >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. > Star is the only backup tool on Linux that allows to archive ACLs. I hate to say it but I doubt that most users know what they are, much less use them. > If you like to know that's wrong with TAR on Linux, check the new program > "tartest" that comes with the latest star alpha. And the things which fail are features the vast majority of users will never need or even want. I ran this around Jan 1, I didn't see anything which justified changing to star, because the tools I have work fine. The only fast tape I have is on an AIX box, run by a client, and uses proprietary package. My interest in DVD is purely backup, I feel it's more reliable than tape of similar capacity and cost. > Also check the testscripts anf archives from: > > ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/testscripts/ I won't beat on this, you want and use the advanced features of star, but don't be surprised if few people feel the need for it. If you want more people to use it, change the name to BackupMaster2000 and get someone to write an article praising it as a complete backup system rather than a tar replacement. Because most people get one paragraph into the description and "my tar works fine" jumps in. No smiley or joking, if you call it a backup system people will see the features as features instead of frills. You can note at the end it "can generate POSIX standard portable tar format" as an afterthought. You write great software, but I don't think you understand how to market it, even giving it away. -- rob bogus -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
