Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 21:59:06 +0100 (MET) From: Joerg Schilling <schilling@fokus.gmd.de> To: nate@yogotech.com, schilling@fokus.gmd.de Cc: brandt@fokus.gmd.de, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, jes@fokus.gmd.de, tofergus@yahoo.co.uk Subject: Re: tar and nodump flag (fwd) Message-ID: <200111292059.fATKx6p25730@burner.fokus.gmd.de>
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>From nate@yogotech.com Thu Nov 29 21:25:58 2001
>> >> 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?
>>
>> >Because there didn't exist a real tar at the time that FreeBSD was
>> >created.
>>
>> Well this is from BSD-4.3:
>[ SNIP ]
>> ... And it has no Copyright AT&T inside.
>>
>That may be, but at the time FreeBSD was created (so many years ago),
>there was no 'real' tar to choose from. BSD-4.3 tar was not available
>publically. I'm not sure it's available even now publically. (Is it
>part of 4.4-Lite/Lite2?)
Look at ..../old/tar/*
it is there... The first version is from user 'bill'
^Ac date and time created 80/10/01 17:28:49 by bill
Don't know who this is... Bill Joy is 'wnj'
... There is even a SCCS log from Guy Haris at Sun in there ,-)
>We tried a number of different versions of tar to distribute initially
>(including the one from Minix, who Andrew Tanenbaum graciously gave us
>permission to use), but we decided that GNU-tar was the best of the
>available versions.
GNUtar has been OK in 1987 when it has been first published as PD-tar & SUG-tar.
SUG is Sun User Group.
I had the same intention (publish star at the SUG december 1987) but for
some reason I didn't.
In 1987, SUGtar was implementing a true subset of the POSIX draft.
It missed long path names via the path prefix.
Then in 1989 it has been adopted by FSF and at his time they started to
make it be called GNUtar and using up the 'prefix' space inside the tar
header in a way that is incompatible with the POSIX standard.
I did it the other way round:
Star has been written as 'mtar' in 1982 to be able to extract a tape
with modula compiler sources on UNOS (a real time UNIX clone).
At this time I only had the tape and needed to guess about the header fields.
In 1985 I made it a full blown tar to be able to transport files from UNOS
to SunOS. In 1985 I renamed it to 'star' (schily tar) and added a bit
(nonstard) code to archive all types of files (e.g. from /dev/*). In 1993
I renamed it to 'star' (Standard tar) and implemented POSIX compatibility.
I was in luck as my 1985 extensions do not give interoperability problems
with POSIX tar.
Unfortunately, in 2001 11 years after the POSIX standard has been accepted
GNU tar is still not able to read/write USTAR archives correctly.
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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