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

[Joerg Schilling]

Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote:

> For some time I had "gtar" as my tar but it was broken too often (it 
> doesn't properly unpack certain archives I encountered)

A serious problem with GNU tar is that it is unreliable and in a signficant
number of cases is unable to read back it's own archives. 

> >If so, then I think it would be best to find the top 5-10 most requested GNU
> >userland features (e.g. "tar z") and implement them in the Solaris userland
> >ASAP. This would give almost guaranteed 100% backwards compatibility with
> >previous Solaris versions and "good enough" compatibility with Linux. 

Roughly at the same time as GNU tar introduced -z, star introduced  
auto-decompression. Why do you like to know about this detail if the tar  
implementation could to this for you automagically based on the compression  
header magic numbers? 
 
BTW: If you like to make Sun tar CLI compatible to GNU tar the way you  
proposed, you would need to break Sun tar's SUSv2 compliance the same way as  
GNU tar breaks the standard. 

Jörg

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