[ On Tuesday, October 15, 2002 at 03:21:23 (-0400), Jed Davis wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: FYI: upgrading GNU tar
>
> Archiving tools/formats should be able to accept anything that can
> legitimately be stored on a filesystem;

Welcome to the real world.  "Portable" archive interchange formats have
almost _never_ been able to accept anything that can legitimately be
stored on a filesystem.  That's certainly true of _all_ versions of
`tar' formats, including, if I'm not mistaken, even the very latest
POSIX PAX extentions.  Maybe the "STAR" format, which is for many
intents and purposes "proprietary" and not necessarily "portable", is
capable of 

If you really must accurately represent everything on your filesystem in
a 100% recoverable fashion then you _must_ throw "portable" out the
window since there is no agreed upon standard portable archive
interchange format which is 100% capable of representing everything that
can be stored on a NetBSD filesystem.  That leaves you with dump/restore
or some 64-bit FSF(v.3?)-specific non-portable extension of CPIO that we
probably don't yet have though maybe the *BSD pax's "sv4cpio" and
"sv4crc" will come closer.

> And as much as I
> personally don't care for dependence on FSF extensions, I'm willing to
> make an exception for this.

I'm really not sure what you mean by that.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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