[Bug-tar] HFS+ support in tar

[Blair Zajac]

Hello,

Of the three tar mailing lists, this seems like the appropriate
mailing list to discuss adding HFS+ support to tar.  Is this the
developers discussion mailing list?  This may have been discussed
already, but I checked the recent tar Mailman mailing lists on
Savannah and there wasn't any discussion (back to June of this year).

hfstar is a modified version of GNU tar 1.13.19 that archives
resources forks and special attributes like type and creator codes.
The source for hfstar is distributed as a modified version of 1.3.19
at

http://www.metaobject.com/Products.html

They don't distribute a patch to this.

I'm currently doing a diff between 1.3.19 and hfstar and cleaning up
the code formatting and other unnecessary changes that were made to
1.3.19.  My next step is bringing the patch up to date to 1.3.25, and
finally adding it to the fink distribution.

I'd like to discuss the possibility of integrating the code into GNU's
official tar distribution.

A couple of questions.

1) Is there any interest in getting this into tar?

   I think it would be great if it could be done.  If not, I would
   still like the patch reviewed to be conformant with tar's
   programming conventions and style so that it doesn't break
   anything.  Would people mind taking a look at the patch?

2) Testing for system capabilities.

   Normally we test if the system provides a specific capability that
   the code can make use of.  The hfstar code makes use of
   getattrlist() and setattrlist() and other OS specific calls.
   Should configure just test if it's running on Darwin and enable the
   entire suite of HFS+ code, say with HAVE_HFS_PLUS?

   What's the best way of testing this, say checking for getattrlist()
   or just doing a match on the output of config.guess?

Best,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <address@hidden>
Plots of your system's performance - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/