Alan DuBoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thursday 01 December 2005 05:33 am, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > 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.
>
> That's fine. wether the future version starts life as star, gtar, futar, or
> tar, doesn't matter.
...asuming that e.g. gtar would care about compatibility which I cannot see to
be true for gtar.
> > 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.
>
> This is just one example, any program on the system could be the same.
This is true, but tar is a good example because there are so many
implementations of programs called "tar" but very few of them implement real
new ideas. So the main effect of the many implementations is much confusion
caused by "minor" incompatibilities.
Also as tar creates archives that need to follow standards in case you like to
exchange them between different systems, it shows what may happen if you only
look for CLI compatibility.
> > If you don't believe, please tell me whether you believe that a command
> > line like:
>
> Again, each program is similar. tar, in this example, needs to come up with a
> single version that is in OpenSolaris and moves forward.
What do you like to tell us whith this sentense?
Do you like to see only one version or do you like to start a discussion which
of them should appear in /usr/bin under the generic name?
> > 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.
>
> The community and CAB should decide how this moves forward and how the
> communtity works with Sun, as Sun does with the community.
Is there a CAB? I did not see any work of the CAB related to such a problem....
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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