From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 14 15:48:13 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E266716A4CE for ; Wed, 14 Jan 2004 15:48:13 -0800 (PST) Received: from smtp02.syd.iprimus.net.au (smtp02.syd.iprimus.net.au [210.50.76.52]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5175343D49 for ; Wed, 14 Jan 2004 15:48:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tim@robbins.dropbear.id.au) Received: from robbins.dropbear.id.au (210.50.44.40) by smtp02.syd.iprimus.net.au (7.0.020) id 3F8F522A01A12032; Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:48:08 +1100 Received: by robbins.dropbear.id.au (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 824BF4155; Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:48:29 +1100 (EST) Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:48:29 +1100 From: Tim Robbins To: Tim Kientzle Message-ID: <20040114234829.GA19067@cat.robbins.dropbear.id.au> References: <4004D445.7020205@acm.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4004D445.7020205@acm.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 23:48:14 -0000 On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 09:31:49PM -0800, Tim Kientzle wrote: > Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar > > PROPOSAL > > Add "libarchive" to the tree, prepare to change the system > tar command to "bsdtar" once it is sufficiently stable. [...] > Feedback and comments greatly appreciated, Let me start by thanking you for working on replacing GNU utilities with higher quality and less restrictively licensed alternatives. I haven't had time to read over the code very thoroughly, but I have a few initial comments: - Padding gzip'd tar archives (with bsdtar czf) causes gzip to report "trailing garbage" and fail, and in turn this causes GNU tar to fail. BSD pax (-wzf) and GNU tar (czf) do not pad compressed archives. - I would prefer it if compression was done by opening a pipe to gzip/bzip2 instead of using libz/libbz2. This would make things simpler, and make it easier to support compress(1). - I don't think the URL/libfetch support belongs in a library that deals with archives. Perhaps the interface could be changed so that the caller could pass a FILE * or a file descriptor instead of a filename. - Filenames are too long :-) Tim