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Date:      Thu, 29 Nov 2001 21:07:03 +0100 (MET)
From:      Joerg Schilling <schilling@fokus.gmd.de>
To:        brandt@fokus.gmd.de, jes@fokus.gmd.de
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, tofergus@yahoo.co.uk
Subject:   Re: tar and nodump flag (fwd)
Message-ID:  <200111292007.fATK73225638@burner.fokus.gmd.de>

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>From: fergus <tofergus@yahoo.co.uk>

>> > Perhaps it makes sense to switch to star instead? The last version is
>> > Posix conform, supports extended headers and ACLs. According to the star
>> > developer (Joerg Schilling) GNU tar is severly broken.
>>
>> Unfortunately, star has it's own share of problems:
>>
>> - A highly idiosyncratic command syntax that is incompatible with
>>   traditional tar syntax.  I think this is a killer.

People who don't know the TAR command line syntax and only know the nonstandard
GNutar syntax are indeed the biggest problem. They don't know the right
syntax and tell other people star is not implementing the right
syntax! GNU programs usually hav a higly idiosyncratic command syntax and so does
GNutar.

Before you tell lies, please fist read the standard and compare it
with the behavior of star.

Star is close to 100% command line compatible to the POSIX standard and to
what 'tar' implemented in the beginning of the 80's.

Here is the only exception to the POSIX standard:

-	Star implements the 'l' option the oposite way as documented
	by POSIX but I would call this a feature.


Of course, if you only know GNUtar Star's standard option handling _may_
look strange. But then why did FreBSD switch to GNUtar instead of keeping a real tar?



>> - It doesn't support incremental backups.  That isn't a problem in
>>   itself, but it's a feature our GNU tar currently has and people
>>   probably don't want to lose.

Do you know how much Free Software I am working on? Do you know how
much time cdrecord takes? If there was contribution from other
people there could be more features in star today.

This reminds me of a wish to a OS. Now that Solaris includes a fssnap driver
it is really nice to do a backup from a frozen version of the FS that has
been mounted read-only and this is fast because there is no need for 
an inode atime update. Fssnap also allows you to see files that are otherwise
hidden by a mount point.

There is only on wish left over: the Solaris ioctl(f, _FIOAI, ) that 
fetches the allocation info of a sparse file and allows to make
fast and correct backups of sparse files. With Solaris 6 where this
feature still exists, star was able to make a faster backup than with ufsdump
even for sparse files.

If FreeBSD implements _FIOAI and has a system similar to fssnap, TAR
is the best backup method...



>> - An idiosyncratic build system.

This is really funny....

The *BSD make system is very very similar with the exception that it
is not portable. The Schily makefile system uses a modern aproach that
is 'make' based, orthogonal and structured. If you don't like the 
Schily makefile sysetem, you cannot like the *BSD make system too.

.... but what is your problem with thi smake system? Is it the fact that
it allows real portability to > 30 different platforms and does not force
you to do manual interventions on all systems except Linux.

The Schily makefile system could even work with the *BSD make program if
the *BSD people would listen to me and fix a bug on the pattern matching
macro expansion that I filed to the maintainer about 4-5 years ago.

Jörg

 EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js@cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  If you don't have iso-8859-1
       schilling@fokus.gmd.de		(work) chars I am J"org Schilling
 URL:  http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling   ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix

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