"Greg A. Woods" wrote:

> [ On Monday, June 16, 2003 at 18:27:51 (-0400), James Chacon wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: pax-as-tar extract to stdout patch
> >
> > Why? Are you trying to claim that no features in the tools beyond
> > "standard" ones should be used in the build?
> 
> Partly, but more importantly I'm trying to say that the priority of APIs
> used by tools used in the build should primarily be towards standards
> based APIs such that standards based environments can support as much of
> the build process as possible; and secondarily towards NetBSD enhanced
> APIs such that those specialized tools used in the build will be
> identical to standard NetBSD tools and such that the build can be fully
> self-hosting with only the distributed tools (i.e. without $TOOLDIR).
> 
> To this end only 'pax' (and only the POSIX API of 'pax') should be used
> for the puposes of handling portable archive files during the build
> since it is more than sufficient for this purpose, and as well NetBSD
> should (continue to) provide a standards-compatible 'pax' implementation.

We already have cases where we use other extensions to pax (eg the
metalog stuff), so we're already committed to using our own version
in the build process.  The ability to do privileged builds isn't
something we're going to throw away because POSIX says pax can't do
that.

This new option is only used during the extraction of files, so it wont
affect the creation of a portable archive (yes, you mention "handling",
but how we _extract_ files doesn't matter on iota if we're already using
our own tool).

Simon.
--
Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
NetBSD Support and Service:         http://www.wasabisystems.com/