Bug#174308: star should become standard tar
Quoting "Bryan W. Headley" <bwheadley@earthlink.net>:
> >>Also, Debian has always taken advantage of the rich set of features
> >>offered by the GNU tools. I see no benefit to limiting ourselves to
> >>the use of POSIX features. I certainly see no a priori reason to
> >>adopt it as the standard to write to. POSIX itself is non-free, and
> >>many of its standardization choices are motivated by compromises for
> >>the sake of proprietary unix systems. I think such systems should be
> >>supplanted, not catered to.
> >
> >
> > So when is ACL-support for gtar going to be available? I'm a little
> > miffed to learn that there are other free tar implementations out there
> > that handle ACLs, while Debian and GNU tar are lagging behind.
> >
>
> Why not ask one of the gtar maintainers? Here's one,
>
> Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com>
>
> And they have an anon email address,
>
> bug-tar@gnu.org
>
Hmmm, is it me, or hasn't there been a GNU tar release this millenium?
on ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/tar, the last release was somewhere in '99.
Now i agree on the "if it works, dont fix it" view carried out here by many,
and Debian should be conservative with making changes that dramatically
change the distribution, but do we want to depend on software that isn't being
updated to new changes? otoh I don't see why ACL couldn't be added to GNU tar,
it has a --posix parameter that seems like it could be used for it, it just
needs to be reimplemented for the current POSIX 'standard' (isn't a standard
that what a large group of people use? oh well, nm :o)
My opinion: if people are still working on GNU tar, try to find out why ACL
isn't being implemented. If GNU tar really is dead, then it's no use to keep
defending it, changing to star (or another clone) should seriously be
considered, once it is compatible.
Just my 2 cents,
Alex de Landgraaf
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Wouter Alexander de Landgraaf
Student AI & CS VU Amsterdam
Phone: 06-16844084
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IRC: #debian/OPN, irc.xchat.org
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