On 27/06/07, James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Joerg Schilling writes:
> Well, I found a solution: as many of the Sun tar features are undocumented,
> we just rename /usr/bin/tar to /usr/bin/otar at the same time /usr/bin/tar
> becomes a link to /usr/bin/star. As Sun customers cannot rely in undocumented
> features, star would only need to implelent compatibility to everything that
> was documented in the public on June 25th 2007 in oder to get the permission
> to replace the current /usr/bin/tar
>
> /usr/bin/otar would need to stay for a while until no Sun customer is
interested
> in these undocumented features anymore.
You're free to do that in your own distribution, but such a thing
would be unlikely to happen soon in Solaris.
Despite having a 4 kiloline man page, star doesn't support the same
options as Solaris tar. It's not a drop-in compatible replacement,
and the interfaces in Solaris tar are listed as "Stable," meaning that
we promise not to break them until the next Major release (and perhaps
not then, if we can avoid it).
This means _at least_ an EOF for tar itself. Whether it's an
acceptable change after such an EOF would likely require quite a bit
of detailed investigation (and wouldn't be appropriate to do in an
ad-hoc way on a broad mailing list like this).
There may well be other reasons to avoid such a change for Solaris,
including star's use of non-POSIX command line options. See:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/1991/031/
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/1999/645/
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/2003/035/
It would be possible to implement a Sun tar command-line mode would it not?
Something like, if star is invoked as /usr/bin/tar, it would operate
exactly like Sun tar used to?
Would that allow its replacement?
--
"Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/
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