Subject: do we really have to "break" 'tar -o' *again*?!?!
To: NetBSD-current Discussion List <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@most.weird.com>
List: current-users
Date: 02/03/1999 02:19:37
[ On Tuesday, February 2, 1999 at 15:31:52 (-0800), Todd Vierling wrote: ]
> Subject: CVS commit: src
>
> Also change meaning of pax-as-tar option "-o" to mean
> "use V7 output format" (same as GNU tar's -o).

GRRRRR!   ;-)
 
>From The Single UNIX Specification, Version 2 (describing '-o'):

        o
               Assign to extracted files the user and group identifier of
               the user running the program rather than those on the
               archive.

GNU Tar has *always* been the lone one out, and *wrong*, on this.

I don't care how long NetBSD's /usr/bin/tar is/was GNU Tar, I think it's
a bad idea to avoid being backwards compatible with Real UNIX, and
gratuitously incompatible with the industry standards.  It's even worse
to be gratuitously incompatible with other pax-as-tar systems.

(This was one of my complaints from the very first day I first used GNU
Tar, and I think one of the very first issues I had with NetBSD, tar
being one of those programs you often encounter first on a new system.)

If we really must have a way to produce V7-tar format archives with
pax-as-tar then I'd suggest '-O', which so far as I can tell has no
other meaning (with '-c', that is) in any other well known version of
tar, not even the one on SCO UNIX.  Note that Standard UNIX doesn't
provide a way to create V7-tar archives any more, nor should they be
necessary, esp. given that even the original Pax could have been
compiled and used on V7 or any equivalently ancient systems.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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