Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> wrote: > > Changing gnu tar to be compatible with one of many diverse proprietary > implementations, for only one of several incompatible flags, is a > rationalization rather than a justification. I agree, but it's at least as good (maybe better) a reason as the reason for adding -I in the first place. Yet people complain about it. Loudly and annoyingly. > Bzzt. The stable version of tar is basically unusable because it > contains several known bugs and is unmaintained. Upstream maintainer > recommended following the so-called unstable tree to address those known > bugs. I've been corrected several times on this comment. GNU tar is unstable because that's what the author says to use, and stable is broken and unmaintained. Similarly, the "unstable" version of GNU tar is in Debian stable, and will break systems when people upgrade to the next stable. I take the comment back, as I was in error. > Most of the options in gtar are non-standard. Are you saying that users > should rely on none of them? Pretty much. It's always useful to know exactly which options you're using are not going to work on many other systems, and to not form habits that involve the use of those options. The same argument is usually applied to programming: Don't use platform-specific features unless you need to. > See above, and lose the condescension. People who use multiple platforms > should know better than to assume behavior of tar flags across > implementations. Sorry about the condescending tone. What I meant to get across is that people who regularly use other systems won't be in the habit of using -I or -z for that matter, and aren't likely to miss it. You can probably assume that -c, -x, -f and -v behave the same across implementations (modern implementations, anyway). That's about all, and isn't that enough for everything you'd every want to do with tar? -- Sam Couter | Internet Engineer | http://www.topic.com.au/ sam@topic.com.au | tSA Consulting | OpenPGP key available on key servers OpenPGP fingerprint: A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05 5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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