> I was having a thought the other night (and those of you familiar with
> my previous throughts are permitted to groan at will).  
> 
> If we included the /usr/sup files in the tar tree somehow, wouldn't
> that keep folks like this (and me the couple of times it has happened
> to me) from grabbing ALL of the files in the tree?  It shouldn't be
> that hard to include the right files in the tar-balls, right?
> 
> Thinking out load, or as close as my keyboard will let me....


This would be great except for one minor problems.  The "when" files contain
time_t's that are endian dependant.  I ran into this when tarring home a 
src tree from a Sparc to my PC at home.  You should have seen the conniptions
sup had when it tried to fetch all the changes since May 17, 2014 or some
such.  Odd bit is it still deleted deleted files...but didn't fetch any
new ones or changes.

If you "fix" the when files to the proper endianness, then things work
properly.  This made me think that it would be nice if dd had a swap word or
swap long word or similar options so this fixing could easily be done in a 
shell script.  I couldn't find any shell util that did this and had to write
a C program to fix it...

Another approach would be to patch sup to do a "reality" check on the time
stamps and if way out of range with current time, try reversing the byte order,
or just change it to use the time stamps on the files instead of the contents
(which do get transferred properly by tar et. al.).

-Mark



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