Re: new tar behavior and --wildcards (proposed middle ground)

[Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com>]

barak@cs.nuim.ie (Barak A. Pearlmutter) writes:

> As a compromise that addresses some of the issues I would suggest the
> following: go with upstream, but add some convenience code, to whit:
>
> (1) Hot-wire tar to check an environment variable TAR_WILDCARD_DEFAULT
>     and activate the --wildcard option if set.

I'm not sure I see the point of this.  The warnings/errors generated seem
reasonably obvious, and inventing an additional, less-obvious mechanism 
instead of just assuming people will try --wildcard when tar suggests it 
seems like a step in the wrong direction.

> (2) Hot-wire tar to print a warning message to stderr if it
>     (a) is defaulting to the --no-wildcard behaviour and,
>     (b) it notices a filename that, had tar instead been
>         in --wildcards mode, would have been expanded.

Actually, tar already does this.  I realize now that you must not have actually
seen the warning in question, which helps explain to me why you were suggesting
(1) above.  

Bdale