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pax-as-tar/pax-as-cpio vs bsdtar/bsdcpio



Hi all,
NetBSD currently ships tar and cpio as alternative frontends to pax.
The pax implementation is lacking:
- PR 24789: no support for files larger than ~7GB
- PR 26512: no support for POSIX interchange format
- PR 29225: cpio -pdm doesn't work
- PR 34716: cpio -pv doesn't work
- PR 38066: no correct support for Long Symlinks
- PR 42166: no support for Long File Names
- PR 42258: additional files extracted by GNU tar
- current-users@ about missing support for handling 1920

Many of those PRs are ancient and effectively prohibit pax-as-tar from
being used as backup program or when sharing files with other systems.

Based on an older discussion, I want to start replacing /bin/cpio and
/bin/tar with the libarchive frontends. The libarchive frontends don't
implement every obscure feature e.g. of cpio, but handle the
functionality the older POSIX standard mandated. Similar for tar.
This would give us a modern cpio and tar implementation.

Joerg


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