Re: [Bug-tar] tar 1.15.91 --checkpoint issues

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Dat Head <address@hidden> wrote:

> man page says:

GNU tar does not have a man page. Distribution maintainers
(such as Debian, Slackware, etc.) may choose to create the one for
GNU tar, but its accuracy depends solely on them, GNU tar developers
and maintainers have no control over it.

Frankly, manpages are a constant pain in the neck. For example, I run
Slackware, which (starting at v.10.0) is shipped with GNU tar 1.15.1,
however the manpage it distributes is still that of 1.13.25 (!).

The only thing I could advice in this case is to write to the maintainer
of your OS distribution and ask him to update manpage each time he
updates the version of tar. At least that's what I do from time to time :)
 
>  --checkpoint      print directory names while reading the archive
> 
> which is indeed what i want because this doesn't have much meaning when 
> slogging
> thru a 300GB tar tape!:

I am not sure if GNU tar ever behaved this way, at least the available
CVS sources suggest it never did.

Some time ago we discussed this subject and in the result of this
discussion the new behavior --checkpoint syntax emerged. Apart from
that, you can now force tar to print progress statistics on demand,
using an agreed-upon signal (see --totals=SIG option).

In your opinion, given all the new possibilities, should we
implement printing directory names as well?

Regards,
Sergey