Re: deb + tar + bzip2 suggestion
At 15:30 +0200 1998-04-18, Falk Hueffner wrote:
>Joel Klecker <jk@espy.org> writes:
>
>> At 14:16 +0200 1998-04-18, Brederlow wrote:
>> >I think it would be a good idea to teach tar to unpack bzip2 files via
>> >the -z option, just as if it would be gzip. Alternativly one could
>> >teach gzip to use bzip2 for .bz2 archives or teach dpkg to distinguish
>> >between the two.
>>
>> Debian tar has a patch which hands off files to bzip2 if the -I option is
>> passed to it.
>
>Why wasn't the -z option expanded to recognize the bzip2 signature?
>That would seem to be a better solution to me.
It wouldn't fit in very well(from the tar man page):
-Z, --compress, --uncompress
filter the archive through compress
-z, --gzip, --ungzip
filter the archive through gzip
(and tar --help):
-I, --bzip2, --bunzip2 filter the archive through bzip2
The documentation leads one to believe that tar pipes the data through the
filter without regard to its contents, instead relying on the filter
program to do error checking, and indeed an examination of the source
proves that to be true.
However, I have run across a patch that adds an option that does use magic
numbers to guess which compression program to use. The URL was posted on
gnu.misc.discuss some months ago, but it is unfortunately not on dejanews.
--
Joel "Espy" Klecker <mailto:jk@espy.org> <http://web.espy.org/>
Debian GNU/Linux Developer...................<http://www.debian.org/>
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