Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 15:32:18 -0500 From: "Brandon D. Valentine" <brandon@dvalentine.com> To: Harti Brandt <harti@freebsd.org> Cc: Tim Kientzle <tim@kientzle.com> Subject: Re: NEW TAR Message-ID: <20040722203218.GB88692@brandon.dvalentine.com> In-Reply-To: <20040722095317.U9549@beagle.kn.op.dlr.de> References: <40F963D8.6010201@freebsd.org> <20040719060730.GA87697@nagual.pp.ru> <40FC9FC2.8050400@kientzle.com> <20040722071929.GA13591@nagual.pp.ru> <20040722074747.GB13943@nagual.pp.ru> <20040722095317.U9549@beagle.kn.op.dlr.de>
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On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 09:55:30AM +0200, Harti Brandt wrote: > GNU tar is unmaintained for several years now and I see no reason to > restrict development because of an unmaintained ancient program. Actually, they just made their first release since 1999 under new maintainership a few months ago. There were showstopping bugs in their previous release related to indexing, yet most every free unix out there was shipping it anyway and those of us who needed working indexing had to run the last, untested alpha release left on alpha.gnu.org and hope it didn't blow up spectacularly. I'm *very* glad to see someone develop a BSD licensed competitor to GNU tar. I'm not thrilled that such a critical piece of software (GNU tar) went unmaintained with outstanding bugs for five years. On the upside, I think in those five years more progress was made on GNU tar than GNU hurd. Now that there is new GNU tar maintainership perhaps the bsdtar maintainer might do well to contact them and make his case for switching to a more efficient sparse archive format. Perhaps we might arrive at a common scheme between the two packages for disparate sparse archive flags to indicate backwards compatible GNU tar-style sparse archives and the more efficient bsdtar style ones. Just a thought. Brandon D. Valentine -- brandon@dvalentine.com http://www.geekpunk.net Pseudo-Random Googlism: summer is to blame for everything
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