Re: increasingly packages need gtar or pax-with-libarchive

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost> writes:

> * On 2020-03-10 at 13:51 GMT, Greg Troxel wrote:
>
>> 3) Add some variable e.g. SHINY_PAX_FORMAT that if set, forces gtar if
>> default tar isn't good enough.
>
> I'd like some variant of this.  It's a bit annoying when people add
> dependencies on bsdtar unconditionally for those of us who have native
> gtar or otherwise that can handle the archive fine.

I just fixed that in this package; a prior commit did add set it
unconditionally, and my not-yet-committed change limited it to NetBSD
5-8 (being nice to 5,6,7, since while they are unsupported, they ought
to mostly work).

> We should state what is required by the package and let the
> infrastructure figure out whether a dependency needs to be pulled in
> or not.  Hardcoding implementation details feels very wrong.
>
> Something like TAR_FORMAT_REQUIRED that has a list of additional
> formats required by each package, allowing for future flags to easily
> be added, then we hook that into the tools infrastructure to figure
> out if the native pax/tar can support that and handle otherwise.
>
> It would be more upfront work but would be the correct way forward.

That sounds ok if somebody wants to do it.  Except that I am not sure
how many of these are unusual flavors that should be declared, vs normal
in the new world, and a tar that deals with them should just be required.

Earlier, I thought bsdtar didn't work, but today it does.   So I would
amend point 5 to say "use bsdtar always on NetBSD <= 8", which feels
like a much more reasonable solution from the BSD point of virw :-)