Well, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is that I understand the problems.

The bad news is that the fixes are not trivial.

First there is a du problem, apparently minix allocates an extra block per
file in a growing way, that ext2 allocates up front.  I think I'm going to
just copy stuff over to a temporary ramdisk before doing the du, I already
am using the ramdisk throughout the script, so there won't be much cost...
I havn't found any more aesthetically pleasing way to do it.

The pax problem is trickier.  There is a hashing algorithm for hard links,
that is just broken.  I think it is broken always, and is just more likely
to fail when there are a lot of inodes and links on the filesystem.  The
symtom is that a hard link will be broken when archiving and the file will
be archived twice.  I'm not getting responses from the current maintainer,
so I'll have to fix it myself... which might take a week or two at least.

-Tom


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