I hesitate to get involved in this discussion, but...
> If interface stability is really important for OpenSolaris, then tar(1),
> cpio(1) and pax(1) cannot implement an incomatible way of handling the -/
> option. The option -/ (introduced in 1994) has the following meaning:
>
> -/ Don't strip leading slashes from file names ...
It looks like GNU tar uses a different option for this behaviour:
-P, --absolute-paths
don't strip leading `/'s from file names
Presumably any merge of star into OpenSolaris is going to have to evaluate
what to do about incompatible options from Classic Solaris/GNU/star at
that point anyway. Perhaps something along the lines of:
if (argv[0] == "star")
getopts(historical_star_options);
else
getopts(solaris_compatible_settings);
?
Hugh.
PS: Solaris tar uses "P" for a different path stripping option, of course:
P Suppress the addition of a trailing ?/? on directory
entries in the archive.
