>If the tar extension is really this old, then I would even more expect to >find a documentation for the archive format it uses.
Why? The knowledge of how to extend tar formats and the fact that you need to document the tar archives is arcane. Much of the Trusted Solaris work happened outside "Sun Proper"; Sun Federal did all the development and it did not, AFAIK, follow most of the ARC rules; it by and large did its own thing. The first attempts at getting Trusted Solaris integrated in Solaris (or at least sufficient mechanism to make it possible to create the add-on) faltered. If not in ARC review, they sometimes failed in C-team review (such as the rather elaborate way to hook additional data to the credential and process structures) When Solaris privileges was integrated it did not follow their implementation model, even though it was (initially?) ARC approved, at all. It did it differently and better. The unfortunate reality for a tar file format, or the format of the output of any archiver, is simply that whatever changes you made, you are doomed to support that output format for a long time to come. Customers just want to read back their data. >If something has been in a different product, this does not give the >permission to add it to OpenSolaris as it is still undocumented. >There are a lot of badly implemented programs in operating systems from the >1960s. Does this give you the permission to add them to OpenSolaris without >a discussion? I believe that NO and you need to meet the requirements of >today in order to add something into OpenSolaris. The integration was approved long before OpenSolaris existed; that it wasn't integrated until after OpenSolaris existed is perhaps unfortunate, but it's the reality of having long running projects. Clearly Sun could not abandon all current, non-integrated, projects when OpenSolaris was launched and redo their ARC cases in public. (Not that it would have mattered much, in this case, as the case for continuing support for the extended tar format is pretty strong) >The current problem with suntar will only be solved if people inside >Sun understand why suntar creates problems that exist because there >is more than just Solaris and suntar in the world. The only known solution >for the the problems of today is to use methods of today. In case of TAR >this is using POSIX.1-2001 extensions for everyting that is added past >December 2001. Star did start to base _all_ new features on POSIX.1-2001 >extensions in August 2001. Will suntar get there eventually? > >In the past, we did have several discussions about non-stable interfaces >in Linux that are a result of badly planned interfaces that cannot stand >more than a year. If suntar is conitinuing to add extensions based on >deprecated POSIX.1-1988 features, the same will happen for suntar. So propose a way to fix the problems, rather than continue to complain about something which happened to integrate in March 2006 and which goes back way before that. The historic baggage is there, to find a way forward means accepting that and moving on. Whether the Sun Tar format for TS/TX is documented is by and large irrelevant; the fact that data is stored in it and needs to be retrieved is. Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
