Re: tar -I incompatibility
On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 08:32:33AM +1100, Sam Couter wrote:
> My point is that the -I option *doesn't* mean "uncompress this file using
> bzip2" for anything other than GNU tar. Now that it doesn't mean that for
> GNU tar either, people are complaining. I think they probably shouldn't have
> been using -I to start with, at least not as a matter of habit or in scripts
> that might live for any decent length of time or have an application on any
> non-GNU system.
That's not much of a point at all. Why? First, it's obvious that someone
wanted these functions or they wouldn't have been added to gnu tar.
There are a lot of things, e.g., preserving atime or stripping /'s, that
are quite useful and cannot be done in a portable fashion. Suggesting
that people never use these functions is silly. Second, most
installations I'm familiar with have various gnu utilities installed,
tar being one of them. IOW, cross-platform compatibility is achieved by
installing the same software on each platform. Doing that should give a
user a reasonable chance of having the same options available on each
platform--unless the program fails to maintain compatibility with
itself.
--
Mike Stone
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