"Dennis Clarke" <dclarke at blastwave.org> wrote:
>
> Why would we replace tar at all ? I personally never asked for it and I
> don't want it *replaced*. I was happy with good ol' Sun tar that has been
> around for a dogs age and I have learned, over time and with lots of
> practice with star, that star is a whole lot better in every measurable way.
> So it stands to reason that I want star in the OS proper. What I mean here
> is /usr/bin/star and not a replacement for /usr/bin/tar.
It depends.
/usr/bin/tar on Solaris is currently extremely antiquated:
- It does not support automatic compression detection and automated
decompression.
- It does not support remote archives
- It does not support recent POSIX standards and even still adds
new features using the deprecated POSIX.1-1988 extension method that
does not include vendor name tags.
- Because it is not yet POSIX.1-2001, it creates archives that
are unreadable by other tar implementations with file names > 255 chars
- Because it is not yet POSIX.1-2001, it cannot read archives from other
tar implementations that support POSIX long file names.
- It does not support cross platform ACL information
- It does not read other UNIX archives like cpio.
- It is slow
- It is full of massive security issues. You may e.g. use it to remove
arbitrary files on the computer if you use hand crafted archives.
- It has no range checks for numbers is meta data.
- Some documented features do not work
- Many features are undocumented
.... If you give me more time, I will find many other problems.
Solaris does not only need the full set of features found in star but it also
needs a more up to date program under the name "tar" as a curtesy of users that
just know "tar".
> I don't know if I should add this or not. At great risk of being overly
> verbose, but I no longer use star to create "tar" files. That would be like
> using Adobe Acrobat to create LaTeX files. Why bother. I am very happy to
> do nightly backups and incrementals and general archive work with the
> creation of "star" files.
"star" files are just archives based on a recent POSIX standard using some
extensions that more and more other tar implementation also support.
J?rg
--
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