Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: ARC/ZOO/TAR Message-ID: <8145@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> Date: 9 Dec 87 14:49:19 GMT References: <3027@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> <617@omen.UUCP> <3456@hoptoad.uucp> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 67 In article <3456@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: | Chuck Forsberg said that tar had a "shortcoming" that "compression | wasn't built in". I see how people on MSDOS are forced to build tools | that do everything by hand (e.g. compression, searching for files, etc) | but I do not build things that way. Since my tar is truly public | domain, you can take it and hack in the guts of compress somehow, but I | will not take the changes back. Tar and compress are perfectly good | tools, like a hammer and a chisel. I don't want to build a "hasel", I | like them separate. If your OS and/or shell can't manage to connect | two perfectly good tools, I guess you had better go build yourself a | hasel. Why bother to build a DOS version at all, if you take the "my o/s is better than your o/s" attitude? | much MS-DOS bashing here, and complaining about OS/2. | Someone said tar doesn't write directory ownership, permission, etc. | He's using an ancient tar program. Mine does, as does Berkeley's and | the one spec'd by POSIX. It *does* archive empty directories, too. No, I'm using a brand new SysV.3 tar. Another case of "my o/s is better..." The reason people like tar is that it runs on UNIX, and on MS-DOS, and on VMS, and it works correctly and compatibly in all cases. It does compression, allows adding, extracting and deleting individual files, and expands wildcards in non-UNIX systems to use UNIX conventions and present a seamless and consistant use interface. Portable to me means "runs in many places." About half the UNIX users in the world are on USG versions, and to cut them off, and DOS users, and not even *think* about VMS, is certainly not the portability I need. I believe that you bash the idea of putting all the functions into one program, but encourage the idea of using one tool for all jobs ("When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"). Tar is a fine tool for interchange of information. Is is a lot better than nothing, but does not replace other formats, such as cpio. It does not replace real archive programs, because they do random file access. | It can read tar archives with or without directories (old or new). | Chuck also complained that there is no apparent standard for tar. | When I started writing it, I followed up every case I heard of (on the net | and off it) of people not being able to read tar tapes from some other | system. The two problems I found were: Some systems write tape blocks | larger than other systems' tape drives can read; and: some minor systems | write their tapes out byte swapped because the idiot who programmed | the driver didn't notice and then was too lily-livered to admit it was | a bug. In short, there are no compatability problems with tar. People Anyone who doesn't do it like a VAX is lily-livered and didn't conform to the (sorry) non standard? This kind of senseless flame does little to enhance your position. | I would be tickled if my Unix tar program became an MSDOS standard but | it's not what I expect or hope for. I wrote it for the GNU project, | the free Unix clone in source for everybody project. If you can use it, | fine, if not, also fine. This is the type of rational thinking I would expect. | {pyramid,ptsfa,amdahl,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com | "Watch me change my world..." -- Liquid Theatre -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me