On 12/7/2013 9:00 AM, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
Perhaps it might, but this would mean inventing a new archive format or extending one of the supported ones. Both ways would produce compatibility problems with prior releases of the GNU tar as well as with other tar implementations. I can't see any gain which would justify our going into such troubles.
The gain was stated under option 3 in the 2nd note. " either copy could be extracted separately, and only in the presence of both would they be hardlinked. " Meaning any linked copy of a file would retrieve the file -- the same as on hard disk and only hardlinks between extracted files that are restored would be restored. That way you don't have the problem that the current design implies. That is if you use the follow-hardlinks option, you won't get hard linked files on the destination. There's no way, if I understand, to both restore hard links and support partial extractions with the current method. I listed ways around that. To support both partial extractions and restore hard links without problems and have a tar that transparently, "just works", no matter which way it is used, would be the motivation. Or you can document the shortcomings due to the inaccurate model of the file system gnu-tar uses -- which is the route currently being taken. Other than something that works without exceptions, I can see no reason to justify such a change...
