Re: pax-as-tar/pax-as-cpio vs bsdtar/bsdcpio

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

In article <20100220033449.GA7393%britannica.bec.de@localhost>,
Joerg Sonnenberger  <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> wrote:
>Hi all,
>NetBSD currently ships tar and cpio as alternative frontends to pax.
>The pax implementation is lacking:
>- PR 24789: no support for files larger than ~7GB
>- PR 26512: no support for POSIX interchange format
>- PR 29225: cpio -pdm doesn't work
>- PR 34716: cpio -pv doesn't work
>- PR 38066: no correct support for Long Symlinks
>- PR 42166: no support for Long File Names
>- PR 42258: additional files extracted by GNU tar
>- current-users@ about missing support for handling 1920
>
>Many of those PRs are ancient and effectively prohibit pax-as-tar from
>being used as backup program or when sharing files with other systems.
>
>Based on an older discussion, I want to start replacing /bin/cpio and
>/bin/tar with the libarchive frontends. The libarchive frontends don't
>implement every obscure feature e.g. of cpio, but handle the
>functionality the older POSIX standard mandated. Similar for tar.
>This would give us a modern cpio and tar implementation.

I am all for it, how about a pax front-end too?

chritos