Re: bsdcpio and bsdtar installed by default

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 05 Jun 2008, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> >I'd strongly prefer to see pax fixed, rather than having another
> >version of tar added to the base system.
> 
> By whom? Are you volunteering? Seriously it is not like our pax has the
> cleanest code. I have spent many hours debugging various problems in it
> and I don't want to keep doing it. FreeBSD uses libarchive too, and it
> is actively and well maintained. Plus you get the advantage of being
> able to use the archiving API from other programs instead of needing to
> invoke tar!

The original proposal, as I understood it, was to add a second
implementation, while also keeping the existing implementation.  That's
what I objected to.

I was not aware that fixing the existing implementation would be
difficult.  I thought it was a simple matter of adding support for a
minor variant of a format that's already supported.

I now see a proposal for replacing the existing implementation with
something that's alleged to be better, and I have no objection to that,
provided it replaces all three of pax, tar, and cpio.

--apb (Alan Barrett)