On Jun 18, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> >From: Chris Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 
> >> If you only use tar x or tar c, and don't know what else is supported you 
> >> believe that GNU tar is sufficient.
> 
> >FWIW Debian now includes star as an optional package for both 3.0 and
> >sid (unstable); however, the default is GNU tar because that's what
> >people are used to.  But star is there if people want it...
> 
> But if it does not get installed by default people who don't know it
> will not use it.

True enough; but since it's not a drop-in replacement for GNU tar,
it's not suitable for the default tar in a Linux distribution (for
example, -j is not included as of 1.5a02, and it has different long
option syntax).  Like it or not, Linux people expect tar -jtf or tar
--exclude='*~' -zcf to work--though I guess you can argue with their
aesthetic sense :-).

OTOH, it might be worthwhile for the *BSDs to adopt it, since they
don't use GNU tar anyway, but they don't like GPLed software, except
when it's the compiler...

Incidentally, there seems to be a weird problem in the man page entry
for -z... it looks like a bit of a sentence got broken up by another.


Chris
-- 
Chris Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/


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