Joerg Schilling writes: > Well, I found a solution: as many of the Sun tar features are undocumented, > we just rename /usr/bin/tar to /usr/bin/otar at the same time /usr/bin/tar > becomes a link to /usr/bin/star. As Sun customers cannot rely in undocumented > features, star would only need to implelent compatibility to everything that > was documented in the public on June 25th 2007 in oder to get the permission > to replace the current /usr/bin/tar > > /usr/bin/otar would need to stay for a while until no Sun customer is > interested > in these undocumented features anymore.
You're free to do that in your own distribution, but such a thing would be unlikely to happen soon in Solaris. Despite having a 4 kiloline man page, star doesn't support the same options as Solaris tar. It's not a drop-in compatible replacement, and the interfaces in Solaris tar are listed as "Stable," meaning that we promise not to break them until the next Major release (and perhaps not then, if we can avoid it). This means _at least_ an EOF for tar itself. Whether it's an acceptable change after such an EOF would likely require quite a bit of detailed investigation (and wouldn't be appropriate to do in an ad-hoc way on a broad mailing list like this). There may well be other reasons to avoid such a change for Solaris, including star's use of non-POSIX command line options. See: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/1991/031/ http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/1999/645/ http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/2003/035/ -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
