Re: bsdcpio and bsdtar installed by default

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <20080605170612.GD497%apb-laptoy.apb.alt.za@localhost>,
Alan Barrett  <apb%cequrux.com@localhost> wrote:
>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 object to that too.

>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.

Yes, unfortunately it is a fair amount of work [fixing POSIX compliance
and the other bugs]

>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.

Yes, this is the ultimate goal. What we disagree is with the intermediate
steps. I am advocating replacing now, where others want to keep 2 programs
around for 5.0.

christos