On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 05:51:32PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote: > > (ii) "tar manual" - my default Ubuntu system does not have it. > > That's an Ubuntu issue, not a tar issue. I expect it will be fixed > whenever Ubuntu gets around to it; perhaps as a user you might file a > bug report with them to accelerate the process. Your complaints about > tar's documentation's license are no longer correct, as the license > was recently changed.
Good. I just looked whether I should file a bug with Ubuntu. If I am not mistaken, Ubuntu takes this from Debian, so the license should be acceptable to Debian. If I am not mistaken (but I have not followed this closely) Debian accepts only free documentation, that is, documentation that can be edited. Invariant sections (like Invariant Sections or Cover Texts) are not acceptable. I just looked at tar.info: # This manual is for GNU `tar' (version 1.26, 12 March 2011) # # with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts ... so maybe that version from March 2011 is not yet acceptable, unless Debian changed point of view since 2006. Maybe there is a more recent version of tar.info? This is what www.gnu.org gave me. Andries > Ubuntu issue, not a tar issue when two disagree it is not fair to say that it is the fault of one of them Now that this is a tar bug list, and license matters are possibly less appropriate, let me also mention a flaw in the program. While archiving a filesystem it gave me over 500000 times the error message tar: foo: implausibly old time stamp 1970-01-01 01:00:00 Clearly that is undesirable. One point of view is that it is none of tar's business to complain about time stamps. Its job is just to archive or extract. Now I do not mind a warning, but I do mind being flooded with nonsense warnings, so that error messages corresponding to real problems completely disappear in this flood. [I know that there is a --warning option (undocumented in the help message or on the man page) that I might have used to suppress timestamp messages. But it is less desirable to do the right thing only when obscure options are given. In a case like this "the right thing" would be to give this message five times, and upon the 6th say "further timestamp warnings suppressed; to see them all, give the --allfoo option, to see none, use --nofoo.] These warnings really slowed tar down.
