[ On Thursday, October 10, 2002 at 15:56:07 (-0700), Bill Studenmund wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: GNU tar goodbye?
>
> On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> > [ On Thursday, October 10, 2002 at 18:15:43 (+1000), Luke Mewburn wrote: ]
> > > Subject: Re: GNU tar goodbye?
> > >
> > > We can then work on incorporating the last few gtar options into the
> > > "pax as tar" front-end, which includes (but is not limited to) the
> > > following gtar options: -C
> >
> > >, and --fast-read.
> >
> > and that's simply a red herring -- it is not critical for any use of
> > "tar" in NetBSD.  Those who really think they need it can find gtar in
> > pkgsrc.
> 
> This comment reflects a lack of listening to others. If you won't listen
> to them, why should they listen to you?

If you've got facts and technical explanations to show that
'--fast-read' is somehow critical I'm sure we'd all like to hear them.
I'm quite curious as to what such reasons could be myself.

Technically speaking though it seems pretty clear with even minimal
analysis that '--fast-read' is simply an unnecessary optimisation.  No
functionality is lost without it, and it could even safely be
implemented as a no-op.  I don't have it in my implementation and I
haven't encountered any problems whatsoever.  OpenBSD doesn't have it in
theirs and I've not found any online reference to any problems over
there either.

I.e. any claim that '--fast-read' is a necessary feature before pax can
successfully replace GNU Tar seems to be, technically speaking, wrong.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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