* On 2026-09-25 at 21:19 BST, Taylor R Campbell wrote:
Caveat: The bsdtar shipped in NetBSD _base_ is happy to do iconv conversions (if NetBSD knows about them). The bsdtar shipped in _pkgsrc_ is built without any iconv support, because it is a statically linked bootstrap thing and iconv complicates the bootstrap story yadda yadda yadda.
If building archivers/bsdtar with iconv support helps avoid some of these issues then we should just do that. It's not in the core bootstrap path - it's only pulled in as a post-bootstrap dependency if a package declares EXTRACT_USING=bsdtar and the host system does not provide one.
I wouldn't anticipate the dependency path to bsdtar+iconv having to deal with this, so I feel we should at least consider it.
And it would be much less of an issue if we had better tar selection infrastructure. Perhaps someone who understands all the different tar requirements and how they might map to different implementations could at least enumerate them - I would be happy to write up infrastructure based on that, so we can do e.g.
TAR_FEATURES+= hdrcharsetand avoid unnecessarily building bsdtar if the host already supports that.
-- Jonathan Perkin pkgsrc.smartos.org Open Source Complete Cloud www.tritondatacenter.com