[illumos-Discuss] [ multi-extent files

[Joerg Schilling]

Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at yahoo.com> wrote:

> >     http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
> > 
> > for a list of utilities  that are part of the base OS.
>
> Althouth pax is there, still I cannot find tar in 
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html

In 1987, there was only tar in the standard. Then AT&T tried to change that to
cpio and succeeded to add cpio for the first 1988 POSIX standard.

Then the so called tar-wars started and the standard commitee later agreed on 
introducing a new program that nobody likes (pax).

The last standard that mentioned tar and cpio is SUSv2 (UNIX-98). POSIX.1-2001
only mentions pax but the the default archive type is tar based.


> Sun did a lot of great things but also many stupid things, so let's keep it out 
> of the
> discussion. I do not want to replace anything, I just want to be able to use 
> GNUtar
> and many other GNU utilities. On my machines I do use GNU things only as the
> "standard" utilities cause many problems when trying to compile standard tools.

Why do you use GNU tar?
Do you get something from gtar you won't get from other implementations?

> > BTW: star is  able to unpack more archives created by GNU tar than GNU tar ;-)
> > Star on the  other side create POSIX compliant archives.
>
> OK. I have star on my system. The question is why not include all three 
> different
> tar's?

I have no problem with this as long as GNU tar does not become the default, 
because this would create many compatibility problems. I however know that 
people who know all tar implementations rarely use something different than 
star. 

Jörg

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