On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 12:53 +0200, Florian Festi wrote: > On 09/09/2009 08:32 PM, Ville Skyttä wrote: > > On Wednesday 09 September 2009, Florian Festi wrote: > > > >> Having a look at the tar formats I do not belief that switching to tar > >> is a real option. The format is just horrible (GNU tar needs over 200 > >> lines to read an integer out of a header field) and full of hacks to > >> remain backward compatible (header in header + extentions). This would > >> be all not that bad if there where a nice little library we could link > >> against... > >> > > libtar doesn't qualify? http://www.feep.net/libtar/ > > > > Not that I know anything about it, but it might at least satisfy "little". > > > It didn't look very trust worthy when visiting the page some days ago. > Having a look at the ML archive now I am quite sure that it doesn't > qualify. A library would need to be under active maintenance and have a > chance to be still around in 5 or 10 years. GNU tar e.g. would, but they > don't offer a library...
libtar is small but did the job very well for I've used it for. I know that at least CMake carry a modified private copy. Perhaps RPM could do the same, or even better, talk to the friendly CMake developers and share the efforts? :) > Anyway, thanks for having a look. If there is a great library or archive > format that should e considered feel free to bring it up. What about libarchive? Although admittedly it's no longer as small as it used to be, the maintainer has been doing a good job of doing regular releases for a long time and will most likely continue since it's used by tar in the FreeBSD base system (and he's a FreeBSD developer.) _______________________________________________ Rpm-maint mailing list Rpm-maint@lists.rpm.org http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-maint
