Re: tar vs device special files

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> So there _is_ a POSIX spec for tarchives?  [...]
> https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html#tag_20_92_13_06

I got that fetched and have been going through it.

It appears to be specifying pax's behaviour, not tar's.  Is tar
specified to use the same format by reference, or is tar not specified
but everyone just implements it to use pax's ustar format, or what?

It also seems to me that significant fractions of it are
unimplementable on NetBSD because they demand recoding to or from UTF-8
for things that NetBSD handles as octet strings, not character strings
(which therefore cannot be recoded to or from UTF-8 even in principle),
such as user names in the system user database (/etc/{master.,}passwd
for NetBSD).  Is there a canonical way of handling such things?

passwd(5) on 9.0 and on 5.2 specify that /etc/passwd contains ASCII
records, but 5.2 vipw does not complain when I put a 0xe5 octet in a
record's username and homedir fields - and it appears to work just
fine, so any such restriction is not enforced.  This means software has
to do _something_ with faced with such things.  Is there some kind of
system-wide locale setting used for non-user-specific things like
usernames, or what?  I'm moderately sure there isn't any such thing on
5.2 and earlier.

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