Joerg Schilling's "star" archiver was one of the very first to implement the POSIX.1-2001 extended pax format, and some of his innovations would be nice to see in GNU tar as well:
* SCHILY.dev, SCHILY.ino - Store the device/inode number for files, similar to how cpio works. * SCHILY.fflags - store file flags on systems (including BSD and Linux) that support it
* SCHILY.acl - Store POSIX.1e ACLs. My own libarchive/bsdtar supports these for pax format already. I adopted them directly from Joerg's design because he did a good job with them. As a result, star and bsdtar are now quite interoperable. I would like to see the various open-source 'tar' implementations cooperate on furthering the standard. Sharing the best ideas from the different projects--GNU tar's excellent sparse file support; star's ACL, fflags, and dev/ino approach; libarchive's handling of POSIX.1e extended attributes--makes life better for everyone. Good luck! It's nice to see such progress from GNU tar after languishing for so many years. Sincerely, Tim Kientzle [EMAIL PROTECTED] Author of libarchive/bsdtar.
