On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote: > 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) > ? ? ? joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: > http://schily.blogspot.com/ > ?URL: ?http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily > _______________________________________________ > opensolaris-discuss mailing list > opensolaris-discuss at opensolaris.org >
why are we having this argument? I believe it leads nowhere. Any open source tool aiming to replace the closed bits should just go through formal review like the rest of the changes do. These discussions are a waste of time and bandwidth nacho
