> On May 22, 2025, at 8:08 AM, Fritz Mueller via Freedos-devel > <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Is there really no one who can say which version should be used in the future > FDTlive CDs?
It is very disappointing that no-one felt inclined to investigate this issue. Fortunately as work is concluding on FDRepo, I was able to allocate some time to check on the tar package. What I found was a larger problem that dated back many years. Prior to me updating or maintaining any packages, a mistake was made back in 2009 or earlier. Honestly, it does not really matter who, when or why. Only, that it got fixed. Willi, thank you very much for calling attention to the TAR package. The problem was: 1) Based on the timestamps in the earliest version of the tar package it dated back to April 4, 2009. 2) While the LSM metadata had been updated at various times, it had not received any software changes since that first found package. 3) The first package says it contains GNU TAR 1.12. However, it contains a different TAR by a different author and is version 3.21 delta. 4) This alternate TAR is not open source and has a restriction which prevents it from being distributed with FreeDOS or hosted in the Download Repositories. It clearly states the following in its READ.ME document: This program is copyrighted matherial and distributed free of charge. Namely: - you are invited to spread it as wide as possible under condition that full and unmodified package is distributed; - source texts are supplied to you for you can build executable code on UNIX machine or modify them for your own usage; - it is not allowed to use program and/or sources for commercial purposes without expressed permission of the author. That makes it licensed as copyrighted material with source available and restricted distribution. So, this package must go. Therefore, I have taken the following actions: 1) deleted the existing package from all Download and Update repositories on both IBIBLIO and my server. Note: The alternate TAR is still available at: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/unix/tar/ <https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/unix/tar/> The original version of the non-gnu package can still be found in the all_cd.iso in the 1.1 repository at: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.1/ <https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.1/> 2) deleted the TAR project on GitLab. Since projects remain for a week pending deletion, I first renamed it to "tar-alt” before deleting. 3) created a new GitLab project for the GNU TAR 1.12 using the sources and binaries provided in the same directory on IBIBLIO as the Alternate (non-open source) version of tar. 4) added the GNU version of TAR to my repository. I have not added the new package for GNU TAR to the repositories on IBIBLIO at this time. This will be done when FDRepo v3 get deployed to that server. Likely, that will be later this month. Until that time, I have put a hold on any package updates to the official repositories. Actually while the repositories can still be viewed and used to download packages, FDRepo v2 is no longer running on that server. Adding or updating any packages in those repositories is not worth the effort until I migrate IBIBLIO to the new version of FDRepo.
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