Re: [Bug-tar] Monthly backup doesn't expand files, but which are in the archive

[Joerg Schilling]

Steffen Nurpmeso <address@hidden> wrote:

>  |A better solution may be to call:
>  |
>  | star -c -f some-file -find ....
>  |
>  |This is even faster than using find | xargs.
>
> I started using star instead of what was on (then) MacOS
> X / FreeBSD / Linux because the first time i have used it on some
> tarball it spit out error messages on format incompatibilities for
> tarballs of mine, a problem area i hadn't been sensitized for.
> And better that is!  And sometimes it would have been better to
> try it first -- i have produced some release tarballs via git
> archive, before testing on NetBSD tar, for example.  No no.

??? What do you like to say here?
Do you have problems with star because it warns about archives that claim to be 
POSIX compliant but really are not? Note that it does not warn with gtar 
archives, as gtar does not mark them as POSIX archives.

I know of bugs in various tar implementations, but I don't know any bug in star.
If you believe you discovered a bug, you should report it.

Please be more specific, so I am able to understand your concern.

> Same is true for smake, by the way, it just failed in the other
> window: it is really time to replace the main work machine that
> died almost a year ago now.

Even though smake is much older than gmake, I planned to let it die in 1997 but 
then I discovered that gmake does not work on many platforms that are listed as 
"working". Gmake does not work at all with non-trivial makefiles on OS/2 and 
VMS 
and it has massive problems on Cygwin because of the incorrect white space 
handling. I was forced to continue to support smake in order to support 
cdrtools on all target platforms.

Smake is much closer to POSIX than gmake, but it uses a common namespace for 
macros and rules and it does not support looking into timestamps in libraries. 
If you have a project that was written for "make" and not for "gmake", I am 
willing to change smake.

> Where was i?   Ah.  Well i could use list= of star, but that is
> non-portable (the STARvsGNUTAR has some false claims btw.).


If you are talking about CLI compatibility, you are right with "list=", 
but please note that this option has been added in 1984 already. At that time, 
there was no -I option in UNIX tar. This was added on UNIX in late 1989.

If you know of statements in STARvsGNUTAR that are no longer true (the file was 
last changed in 2007), please send a list of items that need to be corrected.


Jörg

-- 
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