cc: opensolaris-discuss at opensolaris.org on-discuss at opensolaris.org
Subject: Re: Re: [ksh93-integration-discuss] [osol-discuss] [on-discuss]
Emergency project to rescue Opensolaris from IBM (was: Re: Possible IBM
aquisition of Sun)
--------
Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> Jennifer Pioch <piochjennifer at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > Why? AST pax is the original pax which supports more file formats than star.
>
> AST pax is not the "original pax".
>
> The early POSIX.1-1988 drafts in 1987 did only include tar. USG (AT&T) did
> come
> up with the wish to add cpio around 1988. This created the "tar wars" that
> have
> been fought out around 1990. The winner was a program "pax" from Mark H.
> Colburn
> that implemented an interfact that nobody liked.
>
> Since then, many pax implementation have been created. AST pax is one of them.
Let me correct the record. The idea of pax originated from a POSIX standards
meeting during the summer of 1988 in Denver Colorado which Glenn Fowler and
I attended. There was presentations from proponents of cpio and of tar. At
dinner that night in the hotel, we started talking about the "tar wars" and
came up with the idea of "pax" (Portable Archive X-change) as a peace offering
that would merge the two. We picked options from both cpio and tar and
designed pax. Glenn Fowler implemented pax as soon as we got back and sent
in the proposal to the POSIX group.
>
> The advantage of star is that star not only implements pax but star is a
> archiver library that is easy to configure for new archive formats and new
> command line interfaces.
> Star implements the "star", "gnutar", "suntar", "cpio" and "pax" CLI.
AST pax has evolved over the years and is a central component of the
AST toolkit. pax implements all of the above formats plus about a dozen
other formats including Windows formats and IBM tape formats. If you
run
pax --man
it generates its own man page which lists all the formats it handles.
In addition, new formats can be added via plug-ins. It also allows several
compression methods to be specified. tar and cpio can be written as shell
scripts that invoke cpio with the appropriate optins.
>
> Star also implements many additions to do incremental backups, to archive any
> current and future meta data and star implements a shared memory based FIFO
> that
> significantly increases performance.
pax also implements incremental backups. It uses a very efficient
compression technique.
>
> Not to mention that it was star, Solaris added the lseek(f, pos, SEEK_HOLE)
> for
> to allow star to archive 100% accurate holey files.
Since pax is implemented using the sfio library for stdio it also
handles files with holes. In fact the AST cp command will copy preserve
holes in files.
>
> Star is developed on SunOS since February 1985 and star is well integrated to
> Solaris. Star includes a built in find(1), a configurable diff option, a
> configurable error control and many other nice features.
I am not criticizing star, I am just trying to correct the record.
I suspect that a version of star would be written as a shell script
using pax.
>
>
> See also http://cdrecord.berlios.de/new/private/star.html
>
>
> Why do you like to have a different implementaion?
>
> We only wait for the will from Sun to cooperate.....star is ready since many
> years.
>
>
>
> J??rg
>
> --
> EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J??rg Schilling D-13353
> Berlin
> js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
> joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
> http://schily.blogspot.c
> om/
> URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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>
>
David Korn
dgk at research.att.com
