Date: Sat, 18 May 2002 10:53:14 -0700 From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> To: richard childers <fscked@pacbell.net> Cc: doc@freebsd.org, gnu@toad.com Subject: Re: Errata re: pax(l) Message-ID: <200205181753.g4IHrEv15452@new.toad.com> In-Reply-To: <3CE66FE9.252CD5DB@pacbell.net>
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> 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
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