Subject: Re: FYI: upgrading GNU tar
To: Takahiro Kambe <taca@back-street.net>
From: Alex Barclay <alex@planet-barclay.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/13/2002 09:32:05
Takahiro Kambe wrote:

>In message <20021011160703.GC11980@uriel.eclipsed.net>
>	on Fri, 11 Oct 2002 12:07:03 -0400,
>	gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 01:18:53AM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Isn't this about the second or maybe even third time such a lame excuse
>>>has been made?  If GNU Tar wasn't in the tree there'd be no need to
>>>secure it.
>>>      
>>>
>>If GNU tar weren't in the tree there'd be no way to do backups
>>across rmt, being as pax doesn't know how to deal with it. To me,
>>that's a complete show-stopper on using pax.
>>    
>>
>I'm writing now with my memory.  GNU tar is extended to handle longer
>path name; traditional tar was 100 bytes and cpio was 128 bytes.
>
>Dose IEEE 1003.2's pax support longer file names?
>
>  
>
It just completely boggles my mind that _ANY_ archiver would support 
less than _POSIX_PATH_MAX. I've just had this problem recently trying to 
dump a HP-UX 11.11 system. The system tar fouled up miserably with long 
pathnames. When I used gtar everything was just fine.

Just my $0.02 worth

Alex.