Paul Jakma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, UNIX admin wrote:
>
> > There is no reason gtar should be included when there is tar or
> > star just for the reason of catering to Linux crowd.
>
> Uhmm, what about for compatibility with GNU specific extensions to
> the tar format?
There are few of them.... all include implementation details that
make them needlessly incompatible with tar :-(
- The ability to store long filenames
The implementation in GNU tar ignores the POSIX.1-1988 standard
that allows to store path names up to 256 chars. The POSIX draft
did not change since January 1987 but GNU tar (created as a hack
on the POSIX compliant PD-TAR / SUG(Sun User group) tar which _was_
POSIX.1-1988 compliant) included a POSIX incompatible implementation
in 1989.
This "extension" is the cause of most imcompatibility problems
with real TAR implementation. Star is able to unpack all such
archives automatically except for the MySql packages that have been
created with a GNU tar version that is even called broken by
the FSF maintainers, here you would need to call star -x H=gtar
as format auto-detection does not work.
All known Filenames from source projects fit into the POSIX.1-1988
scheme.
The GNU tar implementation allows filenames up to 1023 chars but
is outdated since POSIX.1-2001 that allows infinite filename length.
- The ability to archive sparse files
GNU tar's implementation could be called a full design bug as
it ignores basic rules for tar archives and all tar implemenatations
except star will stop reading the archive when encountering a sparse
file.
- The ability to create multi volume archives.
GNU tar is only able to read back about 95% of all self created
multi-volume archives. You better extract them using star ;-)
- The ability to create incremental backups.
This feature has been integrated 1992 but never tested/fixed.
Even simple test cases fail with GNU tar. Better use star's
incrementals.
Conclusion: If Sun did do what has been planned and integrated star instead
of GNU tar in Solaris-10, nobody would miss GNU tar.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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