Re: EXTRACT_USING improvements: a concrete proposal

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

I've pushed my changes, since we've been discussing this for a while and
there was zero negative feedback and significant positive feedback.  I'm
pretty sure that any trouble will be quick to fix.

We have had an objection (jperkin@) to adding "EXTRACT_USING=bsdtar" to
packages that have trouble with NetBSD's pax-as-tar, and I agree.  My
view is that a system should be using an extract tool that works with
what seems to be normal.  NetBSD now has one, even <=8, so this
workaround is no longer necessary.

So I'm going to remove the bsdtar workarounds for py-sphinxcontrib-*.

There remains the issue that e.g. on Solaris

  it's configured to extract with "nbtar"
  "nbtar" ends up being GNU tar
  this all works anyway, but is confusing

but that's a minor cleanup issue, not a problem.


I would encourage peoplw who look after a platform to:

  encourage people to set EXTRACT_USING?= in platform/* to something
  appropriate for that platform, e.g. native gtar on Linux and Solaris.


We can g/c the nbtar notion later (definitely not pre-branch).