Re: new tar behavior and --wildcards

[Petr Vandrovec <vandrove@vc.cvut.cz>]

[I'm not on Debian-devel, so please CC me]

Bdale Garbee wrote:
> The new tar behavior with respect to wildcards is not a change I
> introduced just for Debian, it's a new upstream change that appears to
> be quite intentional and well documented, as per this text from the tar
> info docs:
>
>    The following table summarizes pattern-matching default values:
>
>    Members                Default settings
>    ------------------------------------------------------------------
>    Inclusion              `--no-wildcards --anchored
>                            --no-wildcards-match-slash'
>    Exclusion              `--wildcards --no-anchored
>                            --wildcards-match-slash'
>
>    ---------- Footnotes ----------
>
>    (1) Notice that earlier GNU `tar' versions used globbing for
>        inclusion members, which contradicted to UNIX98 specification 
>        and was not documented.

Although maybe that it was not documented, it was widely used, and it exists for 
at least 6 years.  So upstream should fix documentation instead of tar behavior. 
 As documentation is not part of Debian, it does not matter for Debian anyway.

> Obviously, the problems reported with various Debian utilities are due
> to the default now being --no-wildcards for inclusion combined with a
> dependency on the footnoted "feature" of previous versions of GNU tar.
>
> Since this seems to have been an intentional behavior change by
> upstream to better align with a published standard, I'm uninclined to
> fight it, and think our best response is to update our utilities to
> include the --wildcards option, with a suitable versioned dependency on
> tar.

This decision makes tar completely incompatible.  Programs which worked fine 
with tar for 6 years are suddenly broken, and now you have to have two versions 
- one for 'tar' before this brokeness, which do not pass --wildcards, and one 
for this broken 'tar', which passes --wildcards.  And older version on newer 
'tar' extracts nothing, while new version on older 'tar' fails with an unknown 
option error.

Maybe it could be default for tar's POSIX mode, but I have no idea why GNU mode 
behavior should be changed in any way.
							Petr Vandrovec