Re: bsdcpio and bsdtar installed by default

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 01:55:02PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 11:13:21AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> > I don't understand the whole idea (besides I do not understand the 
> > advantages
> > of the new stuff well enough) - if we replace tar/pax/cpio with the new
> > stuff when it's ready, it will get good testing in -current after we branch
> > for 5.0 - but if it is installed under some obscure different name, it will
> > not be tested at all, so why import it?
> 
> One reason is that it makes it possible to use the mono package on
> NetBSD 5.0 and supposedly other similiar packages. pax-as-tar can't deal
> with the POSIX interchange format pkg_create creates and it can't even
> create such archives correctly.

Exactly why do we need to create such archives?

> That is a very practical reason to do
> it before the branch, especially given that the pkg_install-renovation
> branch won't be part of NetBSD 5.0, which fixes the problem by avoiding
> external tar completely.

This has come around too late in the release cycle for 5.0 for it to
be considered for inclusion in 5.0.
 
> bsdtar itself is mature code, it has been the system tar on FreeBSD for
> a long time now.  It has some different defaults (e.g. --unlink is not
> the default, neither is -S).  It does not support historic legacy like
> -B.  For those two reasons I explicitly don't want to make it the
> default right now.  Most of the recent work was to add some of the
> NetBSD specific features like -S and -s.  bsdcpio on the other hard is
> much newer code and still needs validation whether some of the more
> obscure options are really desired or not.
> 
> Both programs have a number of advantages. They are often faster. On my
> laptop with extraction to tmpfs:
> % time bsdtar xzf Django-0.96.2.tar.gz 
> bsdtar xzf Django-0.96.2.tar.gz  0.12s user 0.06s system 99% cpu 0.188 total
> % time tar xzf Django-0.96.2.tar.gz 
> tar xzf Django-0.96.2.tar.gz  0.13s user 0.13s system 105% cpu 0.256 total
> 
> That's after the first run, e.g. all binaries are in memory. Same test
> with uncompressed tarball:
> % time bsdtar xf Django-0.96.2.tar 
> bsdtar xf Django-0.96.2.tar  0.01s user 0.07s system 99% cpu 0.084 total
> % time tar xf Django-0.96.2.tar 
> tar xf Django-0.96.2.tar  0.01s user 0.13s system 99% cpu 0.147 total
> 
> Both programs have transparent detection of input format and can handle
> all relevant tar formats, cpio and a number of other things. For
> example, pax-as-cpio can't create the new cpio format, which allows
> storing hardlinks without all the duplication.

Hmmm, right, is there a PR for this new functionality to be added?

If not, then I'd consider it undesirable.

Regards,
Alistair