[illumos-Developer] ejecting the archivers from illumos-gate

[Peter Tribble]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> Whereas:
...
> * tar is itself usually replaced by GNU tar or star in distributions,
> and

Huh? Augmented by gtar, often, but replaced?

> I would hereby like to propose that we remove tar, pax, cpio, and even
> rmt (which exists to support tar), from the illumos-gate consolidation.

So where do they go?

> I will not be putting up a replacement anywhere else, as selecting any
> replacement has become unduly contentious.  Ultimately, this is a
> distribution choice.  Of course, someone else is free to create a new
> consolidation containing whichever of these he should happen to prefer.

I don't think this is a distribution choice. I would expect the old Solaris tar
to be present in any distribution. Which of the other alternative tars
(and which
version, compiled with which options) *is* the choice of a distribution.

And generally I would expect to find tar as tar, gtar as gtar, and star as star
on a system. (With the ability to select one as a default by means of an
appropriately chosen  PATH.) I don't buy the argument that there has to be
only one, and as gtar and star are developed elsewhere there doesn't seem
to be a good argument to integrate those as replacements. (And it's this
idea that we have to integrate replacements that seems to me to be a basic
error in reasoning - we could just simply say that bikeshedding about a
replacement is counterproductive, so we're going to stick with what we've
already got.)

You could turn this around: wait for an ecosystem of distributions to
come into being, then see what choices they make. At least then you'll
be able to make a decision based on actual data.

I think you should be getting the idea that I'm not in favour of this approach.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/