Star vs. Gtar WAS: Re: BitKeeper licence critic
Joerg Schilling
schilling at fokus.gmd.de
Mon Mar 18 14:19:03 UTC 2002
>From: John Tapsell <tapselj0 at cs.man.ac.uk>
> I'm working on replacements for all the gnu utilities, so I'd be grateful
>if you fill in a few details, and give me some recomondations...
>> >AFAIK GNU tar makes POSIX compliant tars if you use the --posix
>> >option. I've done enough stuff with GNU tar, but GNU/Linux and
>> >GNU/Hurd are the only operating systems I use for real work.
>> Many GNU users have this wrong assumption, this is why I am more and more
>> angry with the people who wrote documentation tha makes users believe
>> untrue things about the GNU programs...
> What would you say is wrong exactly? Excuse me for my ignorance...
>And why is it not fully POSIX compliant?
First some pointers:
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/alpha for the latest star release
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/testscripts for some test archives
and scripts.
Then please read the file STARvsGNUTAR from the latest star distribution.
- GNUtar has some options that violate the POSIX tar command line definitions.
- GNUtar is not even compatible to POSIX 1990 if it comes to
medium sizefilenames ( > 100 and <= 255)
- GNUtar violates the basic tar format if it archives sparse files
with more tan 4 holes.
Star is POSIX 2001 compliant and implements extended tar headers and inside
those extended headers it even supports ACLs (access control lists)
and file flags.
> The trouble is that we are 'stuck' with backwards compatibility, and
>forwards compatibility. If we add features to programs, we then are no
>longer compatible with everyone else (everyone else being other NIX's, and
>people who don't use the latest-and-greatest)
Well GNUtar although younger than star is definitely not backward compatible
to star.
What are you interested in?
> This is good in some peoples books - after all everyone seems to be against
>'bloat'. But for example I patched tar to auto detect compression - but it
>was of course a hated feature... ;)
This is an old feature of star.
Jörg
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