[ On Wednesday, May 22, 2002 at 15:26:27 (-0700), Aaron J. Grier wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: why does pkg_install continue to use GNU Tar?!?!?!?!
>
> On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 08:56:06AM +0200, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> 
> > Au contraire - we cannot switch over to using pax whilst those
> > packages still use '@cwd' in their PLISTs. Even once we have
> > eradicated them, there are a huge number of binary packages out there
> > which need the @cwd functionality in there.
> 
> is there some technical reason preventing this from being added to the
> tar front end for pax?

I had mistakenly thought it was already there, but it seems it's not
quite right -- there's a '-C' option (since 1999/10/22), but there's no
'-I' (aka '-T'), and therefore obviously no support for multiple '-C'
options in a list.

However this feature already works properly in the OpenBSD version (the
patches I sent them back over a year ago were not quite right, but a
proper fix was done a couple of days later), and the FreeBSD version
sync'ed up with OpenBSD shortly afterwards and the FreeBSD folks claim
their version "is now full-featured enough for use by the ports
collection to extract distfiles and create packages."  I believe my
variant works just fine for packages too (it has survived minor testing
of this exact feature and it works A-OK for all packages otherwise).

I don't know why "we" don't just sync with the OpenBSD version too.
About the only thing missing from the OpenBSD version of the main pax
interface is the relatively new and extremely useful '-O' flag.  That
could easily be added.  There are many other significant improvements
and fixes in the OpenBSD code too -- I've been using it quite happily
for nearly a year now myself (with my own hacked in 'pax -O' too! ;-).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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