On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Dennis Clarke <dclarke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> I doubt if they are as well maintained in linux distros as the GNU
>> tool set, particularly in terms of having recent fixes backported into
>> the versions carried in enterprise distros.
>
> They are updated pretty much every month.
My experience is very old (probably w/CentOS 3.x), but when I found
problems with star they were fixed in its own source but I gave up
before the packaged version was updated. Maybe that has changed...
>>> My basic requirement with what I'm doing is to use standard tools and
>>> formats so that archives I write today can be readable in 10 years.
>>
>> I've never had any doubts that current GNU tar would extract archives
>> made with it 10+ years ago - in fact I'm fairly sure I've done that.
>> Or that I'd be able to obtain a copy of it in the future.
>
> GNU tar .. has its own bugs. Is it really standards compliant?
Everything has had bugs. Have you reported the bugs, and were the
reports ignored? As for standards, GNU tar is the default tar
shipped on most or all linux distributions so it is almost guaranteed
to be the most prevalent. The historical limits on sizes of files and
paths by the posix standards and the fact that tar predates them have
kind of made a mess of standards, and you probably don't want to be
restricted by them. Better to plan on being able to get a copy of the
version you write with onto any future platform. I compiled GNUtar on
DOS eons ago and wouldn't expect anything more hostile in the future.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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