Subject: Re: GNU tar goodbye?
To: NetBSD Userlevel Technical Discussion List <tech-userlevel@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Luke Mewburn <lukem@wasabisystems.com>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/10/2002 18:15:43
On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 02:42:17PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
  | There is no need to use an integrated GNU Tar in NetBSD any longer.

As usual, "in your opinion", which is not (as usual), the policy of
the NetBSD project.

There have been recent discussions on this topic in a NetBSD developer
forum, and the bottom line is that "pax isn't quite there to replace
gtar (yet)".

The quickest solution for solving the problem (that our existing gtar
has security holes) is to bring gtar up to date, incorporating any
local fixes and changes we've made.

We can then work on incorporating the last few gtar options into the
"pax as tar" front-end, which includes (but is not limited to) the
following gtar options: -C, and --fast-read.  Once that's done, we
can enable the "pax as tar" front-end and remove gtar.

Luke.