Re: cp'ing passive translators
On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 05:05:16PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> If you know a way of adding support for translators with the old tar
> format, that's true. I looked at it and I might have overlooked
> something, but I didn't see an easy way to add it.
We already discussed this here before. The way to traverse the filesystem
hierarchy is pretty much clear. The special translators like symlink are
treated just like the corresponding unix files. For the other passive
translator settings, you add a GNU extension to the format that is basically
like "long symlinks" (so you can just rip off the code for long symlinks).
GNU extensions for the author field and the rwx nouser bits should be
implemented like the format fields for user ids/group ids and other
permissions, just as a GNU extension.
> Considered that
> those utilities need to be rewritten to support the new format and
> that we can add translators with the new format easily, I haven't
> looked much further because IMHO rewritting is the Right Thing.
Rewriting is the right thing if you want to rewrite it and have lots of
time. If you just need the support, and you have little time, then adding
the support to the existing programs is the much better option. I would
estimate that adding it is a matter of days (including learning your in and
outs to the tar sources and how translator settings are extracted from/inserted
into the filesystem), while rewriting it is a matter of weeks or months.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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