> > At least, I would print a warning if the old style syntax is seen so > > people start fixing their scripts. > > On what basis are scripts written to the SUSv2 specification broken?
On the basis that tar was already specified as deprecated in SUSv1 26 years ago, and that sbase follows last POSIX specification (3 more releases since). > Because we said so? Ethan looked at a bunch of tar implementations, > and some did not support the hyphenated options. Therefore, the most > portable way to call tar is with the old-style options. Again, sbase goal is not to support all deprecated interfaces, or extentsions, you can see commonly see around. > Personally, I think tar is a hopeless interface and we should > implement pax in sbase. I started on an implementation a while ago, > but it is unfinished. After this, we can remove this tar > implementation, which has some known bugs and deficiencies, and > possibly replace it with a tar compatibility interface to pax. This > tar compatibility interface should probably support the hyphen-less > option key, since its whole purpose is legacy compatibility. We don't need to have 100% coverage finished tools in sbase, maybe push what you already have for pax so that people can help the effort, that's also what sbase is about. Then we can see if we move tar outside the repo, if people want to keep using this implementation. Ok to push the patch for historical reasons, but I don't think we should encourage this kind of additions.
