Glenn Fowler <gsf at research.att.com> wrote:
>
> J?rg, I don't recall if you were at the 1986 Denver usenix discussions that
> yielded pax, but the rancor of the tar/cpio discussions up to that point
> made it clear that a single "tar" or single "cpio" only solution would
> be impossible -- basically a hung jury
I was judging from reading the POSIX drats from 1986 and 1987 and the final
1988 one.
> the pax interface was forged at a dinner atop some denver restaurant
> with thunder storms circling about the whole evening (probably some kind
> of daemonic omen)
Today, pax is still only a standard but not loved by users.
> that next week I had the initial at&t research pax working for both the
> proposed
> standard cpio and tar formats (recall the standard initialily had both)
>
> unfortunately at that time it there was no opensource equivalent at at&t
> and a surprisingly narrow corridor between bell labs research and the
> commercial at&t unix organization -- I think the only major items to pass that
> way (after unix itself) were ksh and streams
>
> so the first public pax was Mark Colburn's
Colburne's pax implementation is well known, I heard from the AST pax
implemenation after I implemented POSIX.1-2001 extensions for star.
> I'm sure the venn diagram of star + att pax has many interesting properties
> with benefits for both implementations and the opensource community
> e.g., I'm sure that star handles some format implementations missed
> by att pax and vice versa -- that's no problem for att pax because
> at worse it would mean just another plugin, with no change to the
> main code (or possibility of interference with the already tested
> formats implemented by the other plugins)
The last time I looked at AST pax, the only interesting feature was support for
some more archive formats. The goal of star is different. The goal of star is
to support intersting features and best performance for standard UNIX archive
formats.
AST pax misses all the features I use with star on a daily base. It may be that
there are people that use the features from AST pax, but we would need to make
a proper comparison in order to judge on the scope.
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)
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http://schily.blogspot.com/
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