Thus spake Luke Mewburn ("LM> ") sometime Tomorrow...

LM> On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 01:17:13PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
LM>   | [ On Monday, June 16, 2003 at 00:04:32 (-0400), James Chacon wrote: ]
LM>   | > Subject: Re: pax-as-tar extract to stdout patch
LM>   | >
LM>   | > Please commit this. (It makes things like the distrib/cdrom Makefile a lot
LM>   | > simpler to deal with for instance as it extracts one-off files from the
LM>   | > tarballs for some cd images).
LM>   |
LM>   | I'd very much prefer to see the src/distrib tools make use only of 'pax'
LM>   | (with it's truly _standard_ command-line interface)
LM>
LM> The NetBSD unprivileged build process depends upon the non-standard pax(1)
LM> option '-M'.  That is why we install a host tool version of "pax" as
LM> $TOOLDIR/bin/nbpax.
LM>
LM> This is not going to change in the forseeable future, since we don't
LM> have the resources nor the motivation to change the way that the NetBSD
LM> build system works to suit *your* asthetic requirements.

In other words:

"NetBSD is not POSIX."

We are mostly POSIX-compliant, but not 100% in the command department.
I don't even think we are 100% POSIX-compliant in the interface department.
There is probably some very good reasoning for this.

"We're the Standards Committee -- we put the 'POS' in POSIX."
[considering that the standards committee chose to remain as ignorant as
possible towards Berkeley unless they knew the rest of the world
would beat them about the head (qv. group lists &c.), and that they
favoured SysV (isn't that bleeding _obvious_ by now), don't be surprised
if the majority of the users of NetBSD don't magically jump on the
POSIX-strictly-conformant bandwagon.  IMO, usability beats the hell out
of "standards." But that's just me.

Good call, Luke.

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: Agnostics in the Platform Religious Wars.