I have to, mildly, disagree with some of the assertions in this thread. Star does a number of things that I need, but I didn't know it existed before the discussion on this mailing list. Now, no doubt I could have found it, had I ventured to look, but in general there is so much stuff out there that it isn't possible to keep up with everything.
My suspicion, which is pure conjecture, is that the vendors say something like "tar, we have tar, who needs another tar?" Some comments have asserted something to the effect that "if the vendors don't put it in the distribution, it must be because people don't want it." Now, this is simply not true. I'm not trying to dump on the vendors; how could they possibly know? How could they even look at every potential package without hiring an army of people? Just look at how lazy they are about putting the most recent stable version in their distributions. Cdrecord is one example, syslinux is another example. I routinely update or add 23 packages (at last count) for my deployed Linux systems. As a 22 year user of UNIX, and a user of Linux since its earliest availability, I've watched the decisions made by various vendors in this regard. In general, they do a pretty good job, but they also make decisions that are clearly not optimal. Of course, optimal is a subjective term, but given the lack of available data, my view of "optimal" is no more subjective than views of the people making the decisions about what goes into a distribution. Also, at least in the case of RedHat, decisions are made for business reasons as much as they are for technical reasons, and RedHat tilts more towards the business side as time goes on. It is clearly their perogative to do so, but it unavoidably slews their judgements. I should note that I'm not a completely neutral observer; for years I've had an open source database engine product available that is (in my own obviously objective and unprejudiced opinion as the author) much better than the ones shipped with the distributions. (This is based on feedback from my users as well as generous input from my ego.) So, I think it should be in the distribution, but it seems that my users manage to find it anyway, even though it is not in the distribution. On the issue of compliance with standards of the various tar implementations, Joerg is clearly correct. I've run into the problem with gtar and Solaris tar. You might say, "just compile GNU tar on the Solaris box." But, because of the GPL (or perhaps more correctly because of the weird response to the GPL from lawyers in large corporations), this is frequently prohibited. On Wednesday 19 June 2002 11:08 am, Joerg Schilling wrote: > >>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Jun 19 19:34:56 2002 > > > >Have you tried going from GNU tar to Solaris tar? It's unpleasant if you > >expect it to behave the same, since it doesn't, and probably shouldn't. > >I try to expect as little from tar as posible. -c -f -x -z, and -t are > >all I assume are there, and -z may not even be there. > > FYI: I just released a new star-1.5a04 release. > > It fixes one minor problem with POSIX compliance in star > and it fixes a minor bug in the new "tartest" utility. > > ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/aplha/ > > Also please check: > > ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/testscripts/README.quicktest > > as well as all other files for the POSIX quick conformance test. > > The only TAR implementation that passes the test is star-1.5a04. > > Next best is Solaris TAR. It is unable to extract "Contiguous" files and > it adds more than 12 bits in the permission field. > > All TAR aware programs that I found on Linux: > > GNU tar > pax > cpio > > fail miserably with the tests! > > > > J�rg > > EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) J�rg 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 -- Seth Kurtzberg MIS Corp. Office: (480) 661-1849 Fax: (480) 614-8909 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] pager: 888-605-9296 or email [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
