[indiana-discuss] [osol-discuss] why gnu chmod in os2008.11?

[Joerg Schilling]

Fredrich Maney <fredrichmaney at gmail.com> wrote:

> > And I totally agree that Solaris will not benefit from Joerg-style postings
> > -- as long-time Linux user I saw discussion he participated in on debian
> > maillists and I know which reaction it causes among people.
>
> There are many issues in lists and email with regards to phrasing, particularly
> when speakers of multiple languages and different cultures are involved and I
> do not disagree that Joerg could have worded his complaint more sensitively.
> However, his point that there are some significant - if not often experienced -
> reliability issues with GNU tar is valid and backed up by concrete examples. If
> some people's feelings are hurt by that, it's unfortunate. However, it
> does invalidate
> his point.

I personally see many reliability issues with GNU tar each year (typically on 
each one or two months). To be more concrete: I am either myself a victim of the
problem or I am informed by other people who discovered the problem.

People who always only use a small subset of the GNU tar features and who only 
do this on the same platform may never see a problem in their lifetime.

While porting cdrtools to "Haiku" (a free BeOS clone), I was just again a victim 
of a GNU tar bug that reported by me in 1993 already. GNU tar did not extract 
the whole archive but stopped in the middle. I had to play with the archive 
content until I was able to extract a suffcient amount of data to compile star.

The question is: do you personally like to rely on something that may hit you
any time in the future when you do not await it?

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily