Alan DuBoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > As other tars just do not have enough features, I guess that you call
> > "star" anyway. But for scripts it is of course needed to have a conforming
> > "tar" in the PATH. Conforming means that the program called under the name
> > "tar" must not cause unexpected problems. This includes creating archives
> > that cannot be unpacked by a standard tar.....
>
> You miss the point entirely. This is not about which tar has the best
I don't beieve so...
> features. The tar that is in the core systems should be the tar that I use,
> which has all the latest features, plus supports any legacy support (for
> POSIX for instance), and in general "just works". It should have the features
> of star in it, as well as gtar, or Sun tar.
First, POSIX currently does not longer contain tar.
And if you install star as /usr/bin/tar, you get 99.99% compatibility with
Sun's tar and 100% compatibility with the latest POSIX that did include tar.
If you like the features from other tar implementation from a program called
'tar' you will get into trouble as this is not really possible with a
program that uses a legacy CLI from the 1970s. This is why I always call "star"
because I like the features.
If you don't believe, please tell me whether you believe that a command line
like:
tar cf archive -find . ( -type d -chmod u=rwx,go=rx -o true ) -chown
root -chgrp root
could be called compatible with what users of the command "tar" expect.
With star, this is no problem and has been integrated recently.
> I want folks to work on the one common tar that works for everyone. It's
> located at /usr/bin/tar.
If you don't depend on too extreme Sun specific extensions, you could do this
by installing star as /usr/bin/tar. Star could even implement 100% Sun tar
compatibility, but it becomes harder if Sun introduces unusable archive
format extensions as e.g. done with ZFS ACL support.
> In the current state, I think you would agree we have too many efforts.
> OpenSolaris really needs to streamline these efforts together somehow, so
> that everyone can focus on the real problems rather than the same problems.
I agree, but note that there was already an attempt to replace Sun tar by star
earlier. In this case, your ideas would apply: Sun would have at least a need
to discuss archive format extensions for usability before introducing them.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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