[ On Tue, January 26, 1999 at 21:00:23 (-0500), Charles M. Hannum wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: deprecating long options in tar and cpio
>
> Uh, a factual correction regarding your `history: The pax(1) from
> 4.4-Lite did *not* have a cpio frontend, and tar frontend was rather
> incomplete and buggy.  Not to mention that pax(1) itself was somewhat
> buggy at that time.

Hmmm... thanks.  I'd never actually used the BSD pax until recently (In
fact I didn't even know it existed as a separate implementation -- I'd
always assumed it was the original until I actually peeked in the 4.4
sources recently after discovering what I initially thought to be a
command-line interface bug, but turned out to be merely a difference due
to the different implementation).  I'm not surprised the original 4.4
implementation was a bit buggy -- it's a fairly complex program to get
right, but I certainly was not aware that it didn't have a cpio
front-end -- I now see that in 4.4-Lite the cpio front-end was
surrounded by "#ifdef notdef" and was incomplete.

> I'm not going to reply to the rest, since it's obviously flame bait.

Well, it wasn't intended as such, and if you think that was flame bait,
then you'd better be careful around the real stuff!  ;-)  In fact I'd
consider your last sentence more flame bait than anything I've written
yet in this thread (and look what it's done! ;-).

Of course there's no need to reply if you're sitting on the fence.  If
on the other hand you've made your mind up one way or another a short
summary of your reasoning would be appreciated.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>