Hi! I really like Lzip and have been using it for a lot of my archives.

This is a feature request and not a bug report, which I hope is still okay.

I'd like to use Lzip with tarballs using tarlz, however tarlz uses its own tar 
implementation (does not utilize the installed GNU tar) and therefore lacks 
some features i use in my workflow. I use GNU tar like this:


$ find ./directory-of-data -type f -print0 | LC_ALL=C sort -z | sed -zE 
's~^\./~~' | POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 tar -cvI'lzip -9a' --totals --posix --xattrs 
--selinux --full-time 
--pax-option='exthdr.name=%d/PaxHeaders/%f,delete=atime,delete=ctime' --utc 
--acls --numeric-owner --owner=0 --group=0 --mode='a=r,u+w,a+X' --no-recursion 
--null -T - -f '/mnt/backup/datadir.tar.lz'

GNU tar receives a list of C locale sorted null delimited filenames and stores 
them in the specified tarball. This creates a solid archive, however, which in 
some cases I don't want. It also can't include checksums to my understanding.


Tarlz sounds like the right tool to use to have a per-file-compressed archive, 
although its options differ from GNU tar -- for reference, my Tarlz is version 
0.28 (and GNU tar is 1.35).

Tarlz doesn't have --null/--no-null, --selinux/--no-selinux, --full-time, and 
several others (or some are slightly renamed like --no-recursion versus 
--no-recursive), and every one I used has been hand-picked for my archives.

Would it be okay if you could please add those options and several others I 
specified in my command to tarlz? You don't have to do aliases like 
--no-recursive but it may be helpful for others transitioning over from 
implementations like GNU tar.

Alternatively, could tarlz have the option to receive tar file fragments from 
external tar implementations? My thought was to have tarlz pass all desired 
arguments to the specified tar binary, then tarball each file individually on 
its own and lzip it like it otherwise would.

Thank you for your time. :)

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