Re: bsdcpio and bsdtar installed by default

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 01:01:04PM +0100, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> I'm still not clear on why we need a libarchive-based tar and cpio -
> the number of POSIX-based archives out there is fairly small.

All archives created by bsdtar, modern gtar and star are POSIX
interchange format when any of the limitations of ustar are hit.
pax can't deal with a number of those archives, canonical example in
pkgsrc is the git tarball. Look for the cases where we require bsdtar or
gtar as extraction tool, please.

> I would
> judge; the upheaval within pkgsrc has been huge and I suspect the same
> will be coming to src when if this is done (although this may be an
> artefact of the way the changes to pkg_install have been handled), and
> I don't know why pax couldn't have been modified to handle this new
> archive format.

I never said it can't be modified. I don't want to do the work, Christos
doesn't want to do the work. This format isn't exactly new either, after
all the GNU tar format itself is based on an early draft of it and has
been around for ages.

> Added to this, from the number of changes and bugfixes made to
> libarchive just recently, I'd judge that it's still not ready, and
> that bugs are being found and fixed on a regular basis.  Given that, I
> have to question the urgency of this addition, in addition to its
> requirement.

Right and GNATS has no open bugs listed for pax either. Somehow I prefer
the code base that is audited and fixed.

Joerg