From owner-freebsd-doc Sat May 18 10:44:47 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from new.toad.com (dialup-166.90.46.58.Dial1.SanFrancisco1.Level3.net [166.90.46.58]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 88C6C37B40A for ; Sat, 18 May 2002 10:44:39 -0700 (PDT) Received: from toad.com (new.toad.com [127.0.0.1]) by new.toad.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g4IHrEv15452; Sat, 18 May 2002 10:53:14 -0700 Message-Id: <200205181753.g4IHrEv15452@new.toad.com> To: richard childers Cc: doc@freebsd.org, gnu@toad.com Subject: Re: Errata re: pax(l) In-reply-to: <3CE66FE9.252CD5DB@pacbell.net> Date: Sat, 18 May 2002 10:53:14 -0700 From: John Gilmore Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > Reviewing the contents of the FreeBSD 4.5 release, I noticed that in > /usr/share/doc/ there are files claiming that the utility pax(l) > originated with POSIX. > > I am not entirely certain but I believe that pax(l) originated with John > Gilmore. I was the author of "PD Tar" which eventually became "GNU Tar". It's possible and even likely that code from pdtar ended up in the free implementation of pax (I haven't looked), but I didn't put it there. It was fully public domain code, so anyone could do as they wished with it. As I recall, I had little involvement in the idea of pax, which was some sort of political compromise in the POSIX standards committee between the traditionalist "tar" faction and the breakaway reformist "cpio" wing. > I specifically recall installing and using pax(l) when I was UNIX > administrator for AMPEX R&D, prior to the last major earthquake; that > would make it mid-1987 or before. What you installed in 1987 was probably my Usenet mod.sources release of pdtar. John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message