[illumos-Discuss] multi-extent files

[Joerg Schilling]

Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > star could be a nice replacement  for tar, pax. Isnt it ? I never
> > understood  why Sun never considered  integrating star into Solaris. 
> > What about IllumOS ?
>  
> Well if one wants star to get integrated into IllumOS, then I would
> ask for the integrations of MPlayer!!! I think we should leave the 

MPlayer is not part of the base OS, so it is not something to be discussed
in relation to a software consolidation for a base OS. Tar, pax and similar 
however are part of the base OS. See:

	http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

for a list of utilities that are part of the base OS.

> developers of Illumos care about the kernel and the drivers and 
> nothing else. Whether star would replace tar or GNU tar (I definitely 
> need this as most source code archives cannot be opened with 
> SUN's tar), should be left to the distro people to deal with. 
> Slackware and Debian are two Linux distributions that differ 
> significantly, but the drivers and the kernel are the same...

The reason why you believe to have problems with Sun tar is that you get 
archives that have been created by GNU tar amd that are not standard compliant.

Since Sun tar is tested against the star test suite since autumn 2004, it is 
really POSIX compliant since then. If you really like to replace tar by GNUtar, 
then you would repplace something that is standard compliant with something 
that is not and in turn create even more problems with data exchange between 
different Solaris distros.

BTW: star is able to unpack more archives created by GNU tar than GNU tar ;-)
Star on the other side create POSIX compliant archives.

However, in case you believe that I like to replace sun tar by star 
immediately, the first step of integrating star is intended to allow everyone 
to test whether replacing pax by star may cause problems. If there are no 
reported problems after a while, star can replace the current closed source pax.
In the long term, it may be a good idea to also replace tar and cpio by star in 
order to get unique features. We are however currently only discussing the 
first step and in contrast to other changes, this does not even introduce any 
risk.

Jörg

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