>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Jun 18 19:54:13 2002
>> People do not have interest because they don't know and this is because VENDORS
>> do not put star on the distributions.
>It's not just Linux and BSD (and HURD?), I don't know of anyone who even
>provides it, much less makes it default.
This is _not_ the problem. The real problem is that there _are_ vendors who
make GNU tar the default and lack hints for alternatives.
>That is exactly the point I was making. Star is better at doing things
>most people don't do. Therefore "GNU tar is sufficient," at least for most
>people.
Star is doing a lot of things in a nice and easy way that could not or only be
done with a lot of problems whan not using star. This is not only archiving...
Star is e.g. the only tool on UNIX that is able to 100% compare two file trees
in only one run.
>> Instead for unknown reasons, vendors put the non-standard compliant GNu tar on.
>That's slightly unfair, every commercial vendor has a tar which was
>derived from some AT&T UNIX tar, every free distribution uses GNU tools.
>And as you note the tar they have works well for transferring a few files
>or taking a backup. And the tar files seem to work nicely across systems
>unless they contain some of the corner cases I mentioned.
Unfair is that FSF does not like GNU tar to be standard compliant. They are
using the same methods as M$ does. The best idea is to boycot programs that are
trying to force other people to use their software by widely spreading
non-standard programs.
An increasing amount of archives created by GNU tar create problems.
The reason is that more and more projects approach the limits of the current
least denominator: AT&T TAR-1978. If GNU tar would by default create Standard
conforming archives and understand to read standard comforming archives
this problem would not be present.
I did send a long list of bugs for GNU tar to the maintainers in 1994!
I even promised them a way to help them to migrate to be standard comforming
without problems.
If they did listen to me in 1994, GNU tar would now be able to understand that
there is a difference between real TAR archives and GNU tar archives. GNU tar
would not assume that everything is a GNU tar file even when it clearly looks
different. GNU tar could be able to write POSIX TAR files by request for 8
years. If now somebody said: let us switch create POSIX tar files by default.
But this is the big problem I also have to critisize with Linux. There is
nobody able/willing to understand that there is (or soon will be) a problem
and that there should be a migration path to a better solution!
>> Is it really that Linux people dislike standards as much as M$ does?
>No, but they see the GNU tool suite as a standard. And it's maintained by
>a group of people rather than an individual, which is a factor, like it or
>not.
As do M$ followers.... For this reason, I olny can say again: boycott GNU
products if they are nonstandard ant try to force people to convert to GNU _By_
their programs.
>You said it yourself, if you only use x, c, and t any tar is fine. If you
>don't care if you write a tar file which is subtly non-POSIX, and tar is
>fine if other systems can read it.
This assumption definitely is wrong: see above.
>Very few people do incremental dumps, including me. I would rather do a
>full dump unless the data set is very large. And there are other tools to
>do incremental.
Even with full dumps, star does a better job now.
>> - GNUtar gives many compatibility problems because it ignores standards.
>Unless you are dumping huge files or non-files, that simply doesn't seem
>to be an issue. I pull Linux tar files on systems from unicos to SunOS
>(yes, the ten year old one), AIX and BSD, SCO and Dell (V.4). For most
>people star solves a problem they don't have. It's a great tool, but most
>people see no benefit over vendor tar, and the command line options are
>not the same. Or they may match some tar I never use beyond x,c,t level.
Wrong: see above.
>> Star is the only backup tool on Linux that allows to archive ACLs.
>I hate to say it but I doubt that most users know what they are, much less
>use them.
Professional users _do_ know what ACLs are and like to have them for many years.
>And the things which fail are features the vast majority of users will
>never need or even want. I ran this around Jan 1, I didn't see anything
>which justified changing to star, because the tools I have work fine. The
>only fast tape I have is on an AIX box, run by a client, and uses
>proprietary package.
GNU tar does not work fine, it treats _all_ archives as GNU tar archives and
becomes confused if the archive contains non null bytes at places where GNU tar
does not follow the standard. It then drops a few files from the extract list
.... I would never trust such a program.
J�rg
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) J�rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1
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URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix
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