Re: bsdcpio and bsdtar installed by default

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

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 06:06:12PM +0100, Alan Barrett wrote:
> 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.

The idea of the proposal was to get a working implementation in, so that
e.g. pkg_install can use that. If you run into issues with /bin/tar for
other use cases like backing up large files, you can use it. The idea
was to not introduce a possible large and intrusive change.

The switch to bsdtar (and bsdcpio) would have been done at some point in
the nearer future after testing and deciding if the missing legacy part
should be added or not.

> 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.

tar can essentially be changed now. cpio has the essential functions
working, to be considered are things like the byte order conversion
stuff. pax still has to be written, but most of it can be copied from
the cpio frontend. Some thought has to be put into extending the
archive_entry format to deal with custom headers, but it is essentially
a SMOP. It might get done as part of the SoC. Otherwise it gets the
ability to write FFS directly :-)

Joerg