At 1:21 AM +1100 11/15/97, Simon Burge wrote:
>On Fri, 14 Nov 1997 05:45:48 -0800  Jonathan Stone wrote:
>
>>
>> Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com> writes:
>>
>> >On Fri, 14 Nov 1997 Havard.Eidnes@runit.sintef.no wrote:
>> >
>> >: Yes, I think it is sort of counter-intuitive that in the case of
>> >: "-xpzvf" order matters, while in "xpzvf" it doesn't.
>>
>> >Well, it's actually very intuitive in the case of the dash:  see getopt(3);
>> >it's much more standard. In the case without the dash, you're working with
>> >_historic_ tar options.  On several tars on other platforms, this is also
>> >the case.
>>
>> I thought we were talking about the tar we ship, not standards.
>>
>>
>> The problem is that GNU tar doesn't allow mixing of long -- options,
>> like unlink, and the historic usage.  And we need --unlink for
>> unpacking distirbution sets.  And there's no standard (short)option
>> for --unlink.  Hence, the problem for us traditionalists who've worked
>> tar commands into our motor-skill sets.
>>
>> You invoked standards. What do the standards have to say about the
>> behavour of `tar --unlink'?  Hmmm?
>>
>> Personally, I think it would be nice to fix tar so --unlink allowed
>> the old-style flags. Can we do that?
>>
>> If not, why not add a `U` option (equivalent to --unlink) to both the
>> `historic' flags and the getopt(3) flag set?  Who *cares* if it's
>> nonstandard? You just said historic tar is nonstandard anyway, so
>> we're in undefined territory, just like --unlink.
>
>Jason commited a change to tar about a month ago to _always_ use
>--unlink, so if we're using a version of tar included with the
>distribution tools, we don't need to worry about the --unlink.
>
>This really doesn't help the standards argument, does it? :)
>

But talk about saving keystrokes, the mind boggles.

Brad

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