On Oct 16, 11:46am, woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: don't generate non-portable archives by default!!!! CVS commi

The choice that I had was to enable or disable gnu extensions by
default.  NetBSD had the extensions turned on by default [by virtue
of using gnu-tar as tar], so I followed the existing practice.
Please note that the gnu extensions are not disallowed by the
standard. The long filename and long link entries, are extra entries
of ././@LongLink that will get extracted as mode 0 empty files by
tar programs that are not aware of the extensions.  There was no
way to generate 100% USDA approved ustar files before. Now you can
by using "tar --strict", so in my eyes this is an improvement.

christos

| Reading GNU Tar archives by default would be a good idea.  ("very good"
| according to some folks)
| 
| Generating them by default is a very _BAD_ idea and does not help with
| the issue of helping people ensure the future (and even current)
| portability of their archived data.