From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Apr 5 04:46:47 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2603D16A4CE; Tue, 5 Apr 2005 04:46:47 +0000 (GMT) Received: from kientzle.com (h-66-166-149-50.snvacaid.covad.net [66.166.149.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E9C843D4C; Tue, 5 Apr 2005 04:46:46 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from tim@kientzle.com) Received: from kientzle.com (p54.kientzle.com [66.166.149.54]) by kientzle.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id j354kVOZ078173; Mon, 4 Apr 2005 21:46:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tim@kientzle.com) Message-ID: <42521824.1030009@kientzle.com> Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 21:46:28 -0700 From: Tim Kientzle User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031006 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Conrad J. Sabatier" References: <4243B57D.5050204@freebsd.org> <200503261636.j2QGa2ZI055013@gate.bitblocks.com> <20050404002141.2819f386@dolphin.local.net> In-Reply-To: <20050404002141.2819f386@dolphin.local.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: Tim Kientzle cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Heads up: gtar gone from base system X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 04:46:47 -0000 Conrad J. Sabatier wrote: > > In a similar vein, I just discovered that KDE's "ark" can no longer > properly extract gzipped tar files: > > tar: unrecognized option `--use-compress-program=gunzip' > > Any chance of adding this option to bsdtar? I'm a little reluctant to do this because it is either misleading or surprisingly complex: 1) For gtar, --use-compress-program=gunzip is an exact synonym for -z. Implementing this equivalence in bsdtar would be misleading: First, bsdtar does not use gunzip for -z (libarchive implements the decompression internally using libz). In addition, bsdtar actually ignores the -z flag on extraction in favor of libarchive's automatic compression detection. 2) Implementing --use-compress-program=gunzip separately from -z is surprisingly complex. At one time, libarchive actually did this, but it led to a lot of ugly complications. (In short, a library that invokes client callbacks within a forked sub-process is just asking for trouble.) I recommend submitting a change to the "ark" maintainers suggesting they use "-z" (which is implemented by many different tar programs) rather than the gtar-specific --use-compress-program=gunzip. When testing bsdtar against the ports collection, we found that most programs can be easily tweaked to work equally well with either bsdtar or gtar. If the primary maintainers are uninterested in this change, ark can be patched in the port to use "-z" or to use gtar. (I just noticed that the current port of "ark" depends on gtar.) Tim Kientzle